Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs): Early-Stage Development of a New Watch/Warning Paradigm

Presented for the first time at the 2013 AMS Weather Warnings and Communications Conference, the next-generation watch/warning paradigm known as Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) has moved from concept to nascent program. FACETs is an outgrowth of Weather Ready Nation initiatives of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and is being tested in NOAA's Hazardous Weather Testbed. Conceived by the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) in conjunction with the National Weather Service (NWS), FACETs proposes a modernization of the NWS watch/warning paradigm through the use of probabilistic hazard information (PHI) along a temporal continuum of days to minutes.

To develop a “master plan” for FACETs, a workshop was convened in Norman, OK in 2014. Comprised of a diverse group of NOAA partners, stakeholders and leadership, a FACETs Development Team used the workshop to identify activities needed to move from the current, deterministic, product-centric paradigm to that of the FACETs paradigm. The resulting “Science and Strategic Implementation Plan (SSIP)” charts the course for this paradigm change, including the communication and social/behavioral/economic sciences necessary to do so. This presentation will share key recommendations and implementation strategies identified in the SSIP, the progress made toward achieving the SSIP goals, and initial finding of FACETs-related work in the Hazardous Weather Testbed.