Visualization of Climate Forecast System Data for DoD Climate Monitoring Applications

The 14th Weather Squadron (14 WS) is the Department of Defense (DoD)’s organization responsible for delivering climate information and services to DoD entities. Co-located with the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) in Asheville, North Carolina, 14 WS develops and delivers climate monitoring, analysis, and prediction support specifically tailored to DoD operations planning and intelligence activities. The expansive reach of these activities requires exploitation of high-resolution data with global coverage, particularly when the in-situ observational record is sparse, unreliable, or non-existent. For this purpose, 14 WS adopted the use of the Climate Forecast System Version 2 (CFSv2) operational analysis fields (Saha et al. 2014) for visualization of seasonal temperature and precipitation trends for visual comparison with Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR; Saha et al. 2010). Early efforts applied Stastical Analysis Software (SAS) tools and techniques to compute descriptive statistics from CFSv2 for anomaly comparison with CFSR on 1° x 1° grid for global overland points only. The next phase of this effort refines the grid to 0.5° x 0.5° and enables on-demand user selection of the grid points with complete global coverage. The use of open source libraries and languages, including Python and Climate Data Operators (CDO), accomplish the data summarization and visualization. Future work includes the development of a front-end web interface for DoD users, with variants of the trend plots including future projections derived from the output of CFSv2 and the North American Multi-Model Ensemble (Kirtmann et al. 2014).