Recent Progress and Developments in the Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) Initiative

Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) is a proposed next-generation severe weather watch and warning framework that is modern, flexible, and designed to communicate clear and simple hazardous weather information to serve the public. This initiative was developed in the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) with a focus on severe convective weather and flash flooding. Over the last two years, NSSL has worked closely with partners in the National Weather Service, emergency management, and America's Weather Enterprise to develop a plan to enable FACETs to move the hazardous weather service programs for severe weather and flash flooding from the current focus on binary, deterministic information toward a system based on probabilistic hazard information (PHI) which will form an information continuum at all temporal scales. FACETs would also fully integrate social science into this transformative process from the outset, ensuring that a new PHI centric system would result in improved societal outcomes in comparison to the current warning system.

In 2015, a US Weather Research Program (USWRP) grant was awarded to NSSL, along with collaborators at the Storm Prediction Center, Weather Prediction Center, Environmental Systems Research Lab, University of Oklahoma, and University of Akron, to begin the initial physical and social science research projects necessary to begin to make the FACETs vision a reality for severe weather and flash flood hazardous weather services. This three-year "project of projects" has already begun to yield important results, and this presentation will provide details on this first year of research work. Additionally, future plans for FACETs-related research to operations, as well as a vision of how hazardous weather services and associated decision making might operate in a future FACETs based paradigm, will be discussed.