The National Weather Service currently conducts a National Verification Program (NVP) called AFOS-Era Verification (AEV), under which a sampling of the public and aviation forecasts produced at each Weather Forecast Office (WFO) are verified. Replacement of the AEV program to support continuation of the NVP is planned for AWIPS in the Build 4.2 release, scheduled for 1999. This paper will describe the initial AWIPS replacement of the AEV capability, and the plans for future enhancement of the current NVP in the AWIPS era.
We will discuss the AWIPS procedures by which WFO forecasts, matching Model Output Statistics guidance forecasts, and verifying observations are assembled, collated, archived locally, and transmitted to a national center for production of verification scores and summaries. The AWIPS forecast verification database for Build 4.2, and the manner in which it is designed to support future enhancements to the NVP, will be described. We will also detail the relationship between AWIPS forecast verification procedures and the digital forecast database of the Interactive Forecast Preparation System (IFPS)