The National Weather Service's (NWS) Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS) web pages are quickly becoming the most popular way NWS hydrologic data are presented to the public. Therefore, it is important that the hydrologic program manager at an NWS Weather Forecast Office (WFO) keeps tight control of what appears on these pages and has the necessary tools to quickly isolate and fix any problems that might arise. Unfortunately, these tools did not exist until recently, and for many managers, their WFO AHPS system was challenging to troubleshoot at times.

Two programs were recently developed by the author and were released to WFOs to fill this void. The first is AHPStrace. This program opens up the WFO AHPS processes and allows the manager to follow the path of hydrologic data through the WFO system on the way to external AHPS servers. With this tool, the manager can discover where problems might exist in processing the data. At this point, the manager can try to fix the problem or alert the necessary external technical support people of exactly where the breakdown occurred so they can fix it remotely.

The second program is RiverPost. At many WFOs, forecasts from the River Forecast Centers (RFC) move through the WFO AHPS systems directly to the public AHPS web pages with no human interaction. This can lead to problems. This program allows the WFO manager to screen forecasted hydrologic data from the RFC before they hit the AHPS pages. Incorrect forecasts can be corrected or even removed before external users see any bad data. While there were methods that supported this mode of operation in the past, they were difficult to use in some cases. RiverPost fixes many of these problems.

This presentation will describe the path data make moving through WFO AHPS processes on the way to the AHPS web pages. It will describe how AHPStrace and RiverPost expose these processes to the manager and will describe a troubleshooting decision tree. The easy-to-use interfaces of both programs will also be discussed.