Views on the Current and future Forecast Enterprise: An NCEP Perspective

The past ten years have been marked by steady successful advances in weather prediction and accelerated transformations. In this presentation, a brief review is offered which highlights the successes involved in extending the practical range of predictability (while also specifying the mesoscale details of extreme events days in advance). Without a doubt, these successes are based in large part on the sixty year effort to develop and use numerical prediction as a basis for all forecasts, as well as on the abilities of forecasters to work with these models, taking advantage of their strengths while accounting for their weaknesses. The forces for change will also be discussed, especially as they relate to the expansion of prediction from the atmosphere to practically every aspect of the “Earth System”, the rapid introduction of multi-model ensembles to the forecast model suite, the trend towards probabilistic forecasts, and finally the introduction of the a “collaborative” forecast process that helps bring forecasters from many locations (public and private) together to insure a seamless suite of products that ultimately are delivered to an increasingly diverse user community.