Generating Local Storm Reports and Storm Data Summaries in the AWIPS era

The National Weather Service Weather Forecast Offices (WFO) generate Local Storm Reports (LSR) whenever a hazardous weather event is reported within their area of responsibility. In the AFOS era, the WFO would use a PC-based application to generate the report and send it to AFOS for dissemination.

The LSR data form the basis for the draft set of final official Storm Data. The WFO sends the Storm Data each month to the National Climatic Dissemination Center (NCDC) for publication and to National Weather Service Headquarters for hazardous weather forecast verification. Although the Storm Data is based on the LSR data, the Storm Data is entered via a separate national PC-based application, StormDat. Therefore, the WFO personnel have to enter the information into two separate PC-based applications.

The AWIPS-based LSR/StormDat application seeks to remove this duplication of effort by creating a common database for the two similar reports. In addition, the data will be shared by other AWIPS programs and overlayed onto weather visualization products by the forecaster as necessary.