The Use of Hazard Services Recommenders for Convective Weather Products: Facilitating Severe Weather Research to Operations

Hazard Services is a software application designed to provide a common interface for issuing timely and accurate hazard alerts within AWIPS II. One of the cornerstones of Hazard Services is its ability to create and interrogate hazardous information using a variety of datasets. A primary tool used to create hazardous information, referred to as a “recommender”, has far-reaching applications across Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) and the National Centers within the National Weather Service (NWS). Initial applications to identify proposed regions affected by hazards and their associated impacts include the use of gridded forecast data from the graphical forecast editor (GFE), high-resolution model output, as well as a range of observational datasets. Furthermore, several cutting edge datasets and concepts have been successfully integrated within the recommender framework, including the NOAA/CIMSS ProbSevere Model, as well as Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) concepts such as Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) data. The recommender tools developed for these concepts continue to be evaluated by NWS forecasters at NOAA’s Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT). Many additional opportunities exist for potential collaboration between Hazard Services developers, the multi-disciplinary research community, and the NWS. Future expansion of the recommender portfolio is underway and includes new and innovative datasets such as NSSL’s probabilistic cloud-to-ground lightning algorithm, the Experimental Warn-on-Forecast System for ensembles (NEWS-e), Flooded Locations and Simulated Hydrographs (FLASH), the National Water Model (with HRRRe), and tropical storm surge output. Given this framework was designed to support the Weather Ready Nation roadmap for integration of probabilistic products, it would be advantageous to consider Hazard Services and its recommender framework as a vehicle for the integration of all-hazards science into an operational decision-support environment.