A Glimpse into the Future of IDSS with Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) for Tornadoes

The 2017 Probabilistic Hazard Information (PHI) prototype experiment in the Hazardous Weather Testbed produced tornado information and warnings that were spatiotemporally specific. Specificity is a function of the hazard, predictability of the phenomena, and the cues available to alert forecasters to relatively rare severe weather events. In time-pressure warning environments, forecasters spend alot of time on perceiving and understanding the current state of the threats (radar and satellite interrogation), but new tools, like ensemble Convection Allowing Model (CAM) guidance, could allow forecasters to spend more time in the projection phase of Situational Awareness (SA). Both CAMs and Impacts occupy the projection phase, a space where forecasters will be contributing to the SA of their core partners, sending communication cues, PHI, and products to help to assist completing the forecast as a team.

We have events ranging from brief single tornadoes to tornado cycling and long lived tornadoes that serve as examples of what judgments the forecasters were able to express in their information (e.g. forecast discussions) and products (e.g. advisories or warnings) and the kinds of information the forecasters had available to make these decisions. We will discuss the challenges of issuing rapidly updating specific forecasts for these events and what they communicated and what that information exchange meant to our users during the experiments.