Developing New Methods in Winter Weather Warning Education in the NWS

The NWS Learning Office is undergoing a multi-pronged approach to developing winter weather warning and decision support training over the next year in response to the rapidly evolving needs of forecasters to stay informed of an evolving science of winter weather prediction. In the recent past, the NWS forecasters have learned, sometimes the hard way, the importance of generating quality probabilistic winter weather forecasts and properly messaging them to their users. Thus in 2015 the NWS has developed a Professional Development Series (PDS) that includes a broad spectrum of competencies ranging from understanding the meteorological science of winter storms to the social science of how people interpret forecast uncertainty. Now the process has begun to attach courses to the PDS. The courses started off with several approaches. One approach emphasizes the meteorological science using lessons and the Weather Event Simulator (WES) to reinforce concepts. Another approach takes the form of an in-residence bootcamp where instructors take students through tabletop exercises with actual NWS partners with the purpose of applying social sciences principles in conveying probabilistic forecasts to get the proper response. Finally, students reinforce their learning through gamification as they engage in a forecast challenge of forecasting snowfall in the CONUS.