Current Activities and Future Directions at the Weather Prediction Center

The Weather Prediction Center provides national forecasts of heavy rainfall, snowfall, and hazardous weather up to 7 days in advance, and is a leader in the NWS collaborative forecast process. To meet rapidly evolving stakeholder needs the Center has recently made several changes. Recent changes include the creation of an event-based desk dedicated to flash flooding hazards, increased resolution of forecast products, the extension of rainfall and snowfall forecasts to day 7, and the automation of manually intensive tasks. These changes will be reviewed.

Leveraging future advancements in science and technology the Center is poised to expand and improve foundational probabilistic datasets, such as the probabilistic precipitation suite. Supported by new coupled NWP systems, the Center further plans to extend daily forecasts out in time – perhaps as far as 10 days. To provide improved decision support, the Center increasingly serves as a collaborative leader to promote consistency and accuracy among NWS forecast units. The Center also increasingly interacts with national decision makers. These decision support activities are expected to expand in the future.

The expansion of probabilistic forecasts, extensions out in time, and increased provision of decision support are not without challenges, and require engagement with the atmospheric, modeling, and social science communities. These future directions and strategies to address the associated challenges will be discussed.