Key Highlights from the Hazardous Weather Testbed: Experimental Warning Program 2019

NOAA's Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) is physical space and framework to develop, test, and evaluate severe weather forecast warnings and techniques. The HWT is divided into two programs the Experimental Forecast Program which focuses on severe weather a few hours-days in advance and Experimental Warning Program which focuses on detection and prediction of severe weather hazards at the 0-2 hour time scale. For the past 13 years the EWP has brought researchers, developers, NWS forecasters, private companies, emergency managers, social scientists, and broadcast meteorologists together in Norman, OK to evaluate and provide feedback on how experimental products, concepts, and software contribute to the severe weather warning paradigm.

In 2019, the EWP hosted 4 formal experiments over the course of 14 weeks. In total, 46 forecasters and 17 emergency managers and 9 broadcast meteorologists participated in these experiments. Among the experiments in 2019 were: (1) the Joint Spring Experiment involving GOES/JPSS which various satellite products and Geostationary Lightning Mapper visualizations were tested, Radar Operations Center which evaluated single and multi radar products, and SPC/NSSL which looked at conditional probabilities for tornado intensities, (2) the HMT Hydro Experiment where NWS forecasters ran through realtime and simulated events to evaluate probabilistic MRMS/FLASH products, (3) the Probabilistic Hazard Information Experiment (PHI) for Emergency Managers where they discussed rapidly updating hazard probabilities in table top exercises and used them for decision making and functional exercises, and (4) the PHI Hazard Services experiment which involved an integrated warning team consisting of NWS forecasters, emergency managers, and broadcast meteorologists where the forecasters were testing concepts of human-computer interaction by getting probabilistic guidance for hail, wind, and lightning; the broadcasters received these products and performed typical job functions under a simulated television studio environment and emergency managers again used them in table top exercises and decision making. Based on the evaluation and feedback, the EWP provides a vital component in the successful transition between research and operations.