Monday, 10 January 2000: 2:15 PM
The Techniques Development Laboratory (TDL) has been developing and testing Interactive Forecast Preparation (IFP) techniques since 1985, and is now in the process of deploying them within the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System nationwide. IFP techniques enable a forecaster to interactively prepare digital forecasts of weather elements from which many products can be automatically composed and formatted. This allows the forecaster to concentrate on the meteorological situation and spend less time typing numerous products for dissemination. The common digital database used to generate these products also allows for more consistent forecasts over time and among products, and for easier monitoring and maintenance of those fore casts.
Over the years, the IFP system has grown to over 450,000 lines of source code. This development was in large part driven by feedback from NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFO) testing IFP software. Input comes in the form of trouble reports, questions, and enhancement requests. TDL tracks this input within a relational database and provides status to WFOs via the World Wide Web. Field input drives the allocation of development resources and provides cases for the IFP regression test database. In this way, users and developers collaborate on the successful implementation of IFP techniques.
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