Preparing for FACETs: Future Warning Decision-Making Training Impacts from the 2017 Hazard Services–Probabilistic Hazard Information Experiment at the NOAA Hazardous Weather Testbed

A proposed next-generation severe weather watch and warning framework, Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs), will fundamentally change the way National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters issue life-saving severe weather warnings. An essential part of FACETs is a system of rapidly-updating probabilistic hazard grids, known as Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI). Last year, the PHI Prototype Tool was integrated into an experimental version of the new NWS warning issuance software, NWS Advanced Weather Information Processing System (AWIPS) Hazard Services. A Hazard Services-PHI (HS-PHI) Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT) experiment in spring 2016 was the first of 3 currently-funded experiments to test the software. This year, 6 NWS forecasters from across the country again got the chance to use the probabilistic guidance to issue severe thunderstorm and tornado hazard threat objects in various meteorological environments. Although many fundamental details still need to be worked out, this is foreshadowing a monumental new era of warning operations. As such, comprehensive training will need to be developed by the NWS/OCLO Warning Decision Training Division (WDTD). Results, in the form of best practices and recommendations, from all three HS-PHI experiments’ participants will be a foundation from which WDTD will build this training.