Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs): Progress on Accelerating a Proposed High-Impact Weather Forecasting Paradigm to Operations

Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) is a proposed modernization of the National Weather Service's (NWS) forecast and warning paradigm for high-impact weather. A major project is underway within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to accelerate into operations some of the FACETs underlying concepts, drawing upon partners from NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), Global Systems Division (GSD), Weather Prediction Center (WPC), Storm Prediction Center (SPC), Meteorological Development Lab (MDL); the University of Oklahoma's Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorology (CIMMS) and Center for Risk and Crisis Management (CRCM); and the University of Akron. Funded by the U.S. Weather Research Program (USWRP), the project consists of eleven sub-projects – all of which have FACETs probabilistic hazard information as their unifying theme and goal. As the result of this project, the WPC and SPC will serve as first operational adopters and evaluators of the techniques in this new paradigm, with similar concepts and capabilities making their way to NWS local offices at a later time. This presentation will describe the eleven sub-projects, how they interconnect in the FACETs paradigm, progress in accelerating their work to operations, and plans for subsequent R2O.