Implementing Facets: Presenting the Most Recent Updates and Testing Results for Hazard Services-PHI

Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) is a proposed next-generation impact weather concept that is modern, flexible, and designed to communicate clear and simple hazardous weather information to serve the public. One of the underlying aspects of FACETs is rapidly-updating probabilistic hazard grids, known as Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI). PHI can be used to provide custom user-specific products that can be tailored to adapt to a variety of needs – for example, providing longer lead times, at lower confidence, for more vulnerable populations with a lower tolerance for risk.

Implementation of the FACETs and PHI concepts have been ongoing for a number of years in web-browser based prototype tools as well as within the operational platform used by forecasters (AWIPS) via the Hazard Services plugin. This talk provides an update on new features implemented and tested in the Hazardous Weather Testbed in the Fall of 2019 and preliminary feedback from those tests. The new features include: Threats in Motion, Probabilistic Lightning products, and legacy text products generated from these new features as well as existing probabilistic severe and tornado events.