New training course on use of NWP in forecast operations

The National Weather Service (NWS) and the UCAR Cooperative Operational Meteorology, Education, and Training (COMET) Program is developing a distance learning course on the use of numerical weather prediction products in the human forecast process. This paper will describe the course structure, learning objectives, and content.

The course will roughly follow the type of development and organization in the NWS Warning Decision Training Branch (WDTB) winter Advanced Warning Operations Course with lessons prepared by NWS Science and Operations Officers (SOOs) and cases using the Weather Event Simulator (WES). As with other COMET material, the course will be freely accessible to the broader meteorological community. Now that WDTB has created a virtual WES that can run on any PC with enough memory and CPU power, even parts of the community who do not have an NWS AWIPS machine will be able to use this part of the training too.

The development will take place over several years, with a significant portion to be completed in 2009. Fifteen SOOs are presently involved in course development this year. Additional collaborators will be needed beyond the 2009 Fiscal Year.

The topics will involve basic interpretation, application to various types of forecast challenges (complex terrain, coastal, convection), model bias, downscaling, using model data to prepare the NWS gridded forecast products, and ultimately, synthesis in a section on how the human can add value to the NWP forecast. Use of ensembles and uncertainty assessment as well as use of high-resolution models will be extensively incorporated.