Injecting Meteorology into the GFE Suite

The Graphical Forecast Editor Suite (GFESuite) comprises the grid editing component to the Interactive Forecast Preparation System (IFPS) which allows National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters to express weather forecasts in digital form. The GFESuite focuses on editing digital forecasts in gridded form. Previous versions primarily focused on data storage, graphical user interface, and product formatting functions to allow NWS forecasters to enter and disseminate these digital forecasts. With the infrastructure essentially complete, we have turned our attention to more advanced meteorological features such as weather element consistency, derivation of weather elements based on others, and manipulating forecast data in ways that match the forecaster's thought process.

Recently, the Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL) has developed a framework within the GFESuite with which tools can be devised that capture complex meteorological concepts. This framework, called Smart Tools, is based on a very high-level scripting language called Python. Smart Tools let forecasters write their own tools that modify forecast data while incorporating these meteorological concepts to ensure weather element consistency and derive forecast weather elements based on local or synoptic-scale numerical models. In this paper we describe this Smart Tools framework and explain how NWS operational forecasters use it to generate gridded forecast products.