Probabilistic Hazard Information Processing System (PHIPS): Rapid Generation and Blending of Probabilistic Forecasts for Severe Convective Hazards

This poster presentation documents the underlying processing system that was designed and implemented to support the 2015 Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) experiment with National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters and Emergency Managers, an effort that is part of Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs). This system utilized servers for processing individual, automated, radar-based threat objects (serving as guidance to forecasters) residing in a small floatable domain and updating approximately every two minutes. Automated guidance included NOAA/CIMSS ProbSevere objects, a real-time statistical model for calculating the probability of a storm producing severe weather in the next 60 minutes, and an early implementation of radar-derived azimuthal shear objects for probabilistically denoting the forecast occurrence of tornadoes. Meanwhile, two workstations in the HWT combined forecaster-approved/modified automated guidance objects and the manually-generated objects from two forecasters to create PHI grids and imagery for display in AWIPS 2 and in prototype web applications (prototype PHI tool and the Enhanced Data Display; EDD). At the core of these systems is a GeoJSON service for returning valid objects with attributes denoting object ownership (forecaster or forecaster-approved automated guidance) and object intervention (e.g., allowing, blocking, masking, vector/probability adjustment). Challenges for optimizing real-time display with minimal latency, strategies for displaced real-time playback, information generation capabilities, and future plans will be discussed.