Prototyping a Next-Generation Severe Weather Warning System for FACETs

This presentation will give a chronology of next-generation severe weather warning capabilities that have been prototyped, tested, and refined during three years of NOAA's Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) experiment, an effort that is part of the FACETs project. These capabilities center around the implementation and usage of object-based methods for identifying, tracking, and forecasting hail, wind, tornado, and lightning events. The main topics include:

• Tools for manually identifying, tracking, and forecasting hazard events
• Ideal levels for including automated object-based guidance into the forecast process
• Visualization of object-derived storm history information
• Derivation of location-based timing, likelihood, and legacy warning information (e.g., PHI)

Discussion of these topics will include several initial assumptions or simplifications made (e.g., hazard duration, probability forecasting, spatio-temporal filters, object identification and tracking settings), progress toward refining these simplifications, and how testing and evaluating these capabilities in the HWT with NWS forecasters and key decision-makers with a cross-disciplinary research team has resulted in remarkable insights for improving these simplifications and for identifying needed capabilities.