The Weather Prediction Center Day 8-10 Forecast Experiment: Experiment Overview

The Weather Prediction Center (WPC) and the National Weather Service (NWS) currently provide detailed weather forecasts out to day 7. There is intense demand and interest in extending daily weather forecasts to ten days, with a focus on identifying high-impact weather, such as intense precipitation events and extreme heat and cold. The extension of daily forecasts out to ten days requires the evaluation of the efficacy of model guidance for this time frame and the development of a methodology to turn this raw model guidance into consistent, actionable products and services for decision makers. To address these issues, WPC’s Hydrometeorological Testbed (HMT) began a real-time experiment dedicated to forecasting for days 8, 9, and 10. This presentation will serve as an overview of this experiment, with a focus on the forecasting methodologies that were developed to create forecasts for days 8, 9, and 10 and the suite of experimental, probabilistic forecast products that were created to communicate this information to our end users.