A New CPC 8-14 Day Probabilistic Extremes Outlook

The Climate Prediction Center (CPC) is developing a web based user-application that is intended to provide the public, emergency managers, planners and forecasters advance notice of potential extreme weather and climate events at the 8-14 day time range. These events would have varied impacts to various users including potential hazards, as well as benefits. Our goal is to produce an outlook tool that is useful to a variety of users with various backgrounds and interests, and help both technical and non-technical decision makers.

This tool will be publicly available on the web and presents daily probabilities of extremes occurring in the week-2 period that is categorized as reaching and/or exceeding a series of thresholds. These thresholds are available as both percentiles and probabilities and were selected based on previous experience from the current hazards outlook, as well as feedback from both internal and external end-users, and with different interests and insights.

Initially the the outlook will be for daily maximum and minimum temperatures, but will eventually have more variables, including precipitation. Probabilities are extracted from the NCEP Global Ensemble Forecast System (GEFS) model after applying a calibration using the ensemble regression technique.

By presenting this work, we hope to gain valuable feedback from attendees of this meeting to improve the tool and have the outlook exploit forecast information that would be useful to many end-users.