The Australian Bureau of Meteorology is developing the Australian Marine Forecast System (AMFS) which is designed to streamline marine forecast operations by allowing meteorologists to interactively manipulate forecast wind and sea fields (from Numerical Weather Prediction schemes), and then to automatically produce the graphical and textual products required. In this way, the forecaster is able to concentrate on the science of getting the forecast right, rather than spend time crafting the words. In addition, better verification procedures are able to operate on the digital forecast fields stored in the Forecast Database.

AMFS includes visualisation, graphical editing, automatic text generation, graphics preparation and verification. The system is developed in the Java programming language, and makes use of the VisAD libraries for visualisation of numerical data developed at the University of Wisconsin.

The paper will outline the current status of the AMFS project, and progress with operational trials in Australian forecast offices.