Nowcast Expert System with the Social Network Weather-Reports in Japan

Weathernews Inc. has been developing and operating the Weather Reports network based on Cellphone Social Network Service in Japan. We receive approximately 10,000-500,000 reports per day from our 3 millions members of supporters (Weather Reporters), as of 2012. The reports include the weather status, text comment, camera image of their overhead, and the location information obtained from GPS. The reports give more detailed and quick local information, like human's eyes. Weathernews has been developing and testing the application of these subjective and ambiguous information to a “Nowcast Expert System” fused with the “conventional” observations and NWP analysis data sets using fuzzy inference engine. This collaborative project with OU started in Oct. 2010 and the test for operational application has just begun in Jan. 2012. This project is organized as follows. The first target is the reliable and appropriate nowcast information for snow-fall intensity and convective initiation risk, and the second target is to lead and train the young forecasters to learn the knowledge and gain their experience effectively. We'd like to introduce and discuss these process & verification of the challenge.