Incorporating End Users in Hazardous Weather Testbed Experiments

The NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) is a joint project of the National Severe Storms Laboratory, Storm Prediction Center, and National Weather Service (NWS) Norman Weather Forecast Office. The HWT provides a conceptual framework and a physical space to foster collaboration between research and operations to test and evaluate emerging technologies and science for NWS operations. This presentation will highlight the incorporation of end users into a testbed environment, thereby bringing end-user perspectives into the R2O process at an earlier point, and hastening the transition process.

Historically, the HWT has focused on NWS forecaster testing of new tools in technologies. In 2014, the Joint Polar Satellite System and GOES-R Convective Applications experiment began incorporating a broadcast meteorologist participant in addition to NWS forecasters. The broadcaster sat alongside and assumed the role of a forecaster. This allowed the broadcaster to become more innately familiar with the warning decision making process, AWIPS2 software, and challenges forecasters face. In addition, the inclusion of a broadcaster allowed researchers to collect unique feedback via discussion and surveys. The Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) Prototype experiment incorporated emergency managers starting in 2015 and broadcast meteorologists in 2016. In this experiment, each end user group was physically separated from the forecasters, acting as members of an integrated warning team and communicating through NWSChat. All three groups were brought together at the end of each day for group discussion regarding the challenges each group faced. In 2018, end user groups came in different weeks, allowing for additional experimental control, as well as increased focus and depth of study on their decision-making processes alone. In 2019, broadcasters and emergency managers received output from the Hazard Services PHI experiment. Through all of these experiments, a process of co-creation emerged that we argue to be an essential aspect of transitioning new technologies to applications for end-users.