The National Weather Service (NWS) is studying role of automated, short-term forecasting to improve it's ability to detect and warn for high impact weather events associated with thunderstorms, i.e. heavy rain, hail, lightning, and high winds, in the 0-1 hour timeframe particularly for it's aviation and public customers. This project aims to transfer the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) Autonowcaster (ANC) system to NWS operations to provide guidance to forecasters for short term products, area weather updates, spotter briefings, and for use by meteorologists at the Center Weather Service Unit (CWSU).

The ANC system is currently being run at the NWS Weather Forecast Office (WFO) in Fort Worth, Texas as part of the Forecaster-Over-the-Loop Nowcasting demonstration. To support this demonstration, the NWS' Meteorological Development Laboratory (MDL) has developed an Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS)-ANC data management system and application interface to manage the data receipt, decoding, storage, retrieval, display, and provide for forecaster interactions of the NCAR Autonowcast products on AWIPS.

In this paper, we will describe the operational scenarios of the use of ANC system within AWIPS environment by the forecasters of the WFO in Ft. Worth and outline the MDL design for implementing a regional ANC system into the NWS operations. We will highlight the benefit of providing forecaster input necessary to improve automated nowcasts and discuss future improvements.