Risk Reduction Testing to Ensure a Successful Collaborative Forecast Process Demonstration

For the past four years, the NWS has been exploring what is referred to as the Collaborative Forecast Process (CFP). A goal of the CFP is to leverage expertise across all levels of the agency to produce forecast data consistent in space, time, and scale--without the loss of skill. In the Fall of 2018, a tabletop exercise was performed that mapped the workflow between the NWS’s Weather Prediction Center (WPC) and NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) from the contiguous United States (CONUS) during the creation of a CONUS wide quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF). The tabletop exercise provided information for framing a full CFP demonstration of a collaborative process for the production of QPF. In the Fall 2019, the NWS CFP team will be identifying options for conducting this QPF CFP demonstration.

In 2020, the NWS has set a goal to demonstrate the QPF CFP. This presentation explains the inclusion of engineering principles into the CFP to address the technical and scientific risk associated with these options. The NWS plans to use a series of risk reduction tests to validate assumptions and identify any technical and/or scientific obstacles to the implementation of the QPF CFP. This presentation also outlines the progress to date of these risk reduction activities, as well as the lessons learned leading up to the planned 2020 demonstration of a QPF CFP.