High impact gridded weather forecasts

The National Weather Service Weather Forecast Office in Tulsa, Oklahoma, routinely uses the Gridded Forecast Editor to compute a variety of high impact gridded forecast products for distribution to state and local decision makers. Emergency managers, city officials and the general public can obtain the information from our web site and apply that information to their specific problem.

The simplicity of providing high impact weather analyses and forecasts through the gridded forecast database is that forecasters need only maintain accurate grids, both observed and forecast. Algorithms have been developed to access those grids each hour and produce updates to the high impact weather forecasts with minimal input required by the forecaster. These high impact weather forecast grids also serve to enhance forecasters' situational awareness of rapidly changing weather conditions that may negatively impact our customers. In a similar way, algorithms also use the forecast grids for the entire seven day forecast period to identify high impact weather events in the longer term.

Examples of high impact weather forecasts created in the gridded forecasts database include fire danger, severe convective weather probabilities, probabilistic quantitative precipitation forecasts, and others. Examples of each and short explanations will be provided.