A 10-Year History of Improving Gridded Forecasting in the National Weather Service (NWS) Central Region

Gridded forecasting via the Graphical Forecast Editor (GFE) began in the NWS during the early 2000s. In the years which followed, Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) largely developed their own approaches and tools to speed up the creation of gridded forecasts. This had the unintended consequence of creating non-seamless (or inconsistent) forecasts along many WFO borders. Therefore, in 2008 a NWS Central Region (CR) team consisting of management and bargaining unit members was formed to address gridded forecasting challenges, including consistency. That team, the Central Region Grid Methodology Advisory Team (CRGMAT), is still in existence today.

The CRGMAT’s main task, per its charter, was to get a pulse on the state of gridded forecasting across CR, and then develop a set of recommendations to improve accuracy, consistency and the overall forecast process. The team developed eight recommendations which resulted in various initiatives, including: development of common model decoders and model blends for GFE, a day 4 through 7 forecast policy, a verification system, the Enhanced Short-Term Forecast (ESTF), and a QPF experiment with the Weather Prediction Center (WPC). These initiatives culminated during the past three years into the ForecastBuilder program built and delivered by the team, and migrating over to the National Blend of Models for a common starting point in 2019. The presentation will dive deeper into the history of the CRGMAT, including the current status of these initiatives.