8.1 FDSE Progress Report

Wednesday, 10 January 2018: 10:30 AM
Room 17A (ACC) (Austin, Texas)
Thomas J. LeFebvre, NOAA/ESRL, Boulder, CO; and K. Manross and P. T. McCaslin

The goal of the Forecast Decision Support Environment (FSDE) program is to provide technologies that foster a rich environment in which forecasters can naturally provide Decision Support Services (DSS) to their customers. With projects under FDSE nearing operational status, we provide a status report on their progress as well as future plans.

The Grid Monitor presents a status of the current forecast as compared to a gridded analysis of observations that forecasters choose. This allows the forecaster to assess the overall forecast quality in less than a minute thus saving time when updating the forecast. Forecasters can also compare their forecast to other forecasts to determine when and where there are major differences. Other options provide time series over predefined forecast areas to view discrepancies in time.

The PointBlend project has been recast as research framework in which specific forecast blending algorithms can be compared as if they were executed in real-time. Using an archive of gridded observations and forecasts, the framework can assess each algorithm’s performance and suggest the best blending technique. The results are expected to support the evolution of the National Blend of Models (NBM). Work with the Impacts Catalog will include prototypes that display various types of catalog information in multiple perspectives of Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS).

Finally, the Ensemble Tool, which directly assists forecasters when performing DSS activities by presenting displays of model ensemble forecasts, has been baselined and is now part of the core package used by NWS forecasters. We will provide a status on the progress of each of these efforts as well as future plans.

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