Part of the National Severe Storms Laboratory's (NSSL) mission is to perform research and develop prototype tools that will increase the NWS's capability to produce timely and effective severe and hazardous weather warnings. As part of this effort we have developed and are continuing to develop new enhanced severe weather detection algorithms for inclusion in the WSR-88D system. With the advent of the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS), and all of the data streams associated with it, another opportunity now exists to develop applications that integrate data from all operational weather sensing systems. NSSL has begun developing algorithms and techniques that integrate data to provide a synergistic view of weather phenomena.
We have developed a prototype Warning Decision Support System (WDSS) that we have tested in NWS Weather Forecast Offices since 1994. The concept of a WDSS is similar to decision support systems that have been built for other professions (e.g., financial managers, insurance industry), where the ultimate goal is to put the right information in the hands of the decision maker in a timely fashion. For meteorologists making warning decisions, this means gathering data from all available weather sensors, using image processing and expert systems to help interpret data and turn them into useful information, and finally utilizing interactive display techniques that allow the meteorologist easy access to important information as well as to direct them to the most critical storms. At the present time we have decided that our present prototype WDSS can no longer meet our future needs for testing new concepts. Since our goal is to move our display concepts and our algorithms into both the AWIPS and WSR-88D systems we are in the process of developing a "Next Generation WDSS" that will utilize some display concepts from AWIPS and Applications Programmer Interfaces (API) from both AWIPS and the WSR-88D. This will allow much easier technology transfer of our display concepts and algorithms to these operational systems.
We plan to make several significant additions and changes as part of the Next Generation WDSS. These include changing the philosophy from 1) radar-based with the addition of other data streams to that of a fully integrated observing systems approach; 2) changing the coverage area from the nominal 230 km from an individual radar to the County Warning Area (CWA) of the local office by ingesting data from all WSR-88Ds that provide coverage of the CWA; 3) algorithms that utilize only one data source to algorithms that ingest many data sources and take an integrated approach to find signatures and provide information to forecasters. In addition, by working with other organizations, we plan to add these significant components to the prototype Next Generation WDSS: 1) an Electronic Performance Support System; 2) a Flash Flood Prediction Algorithm; 3) Warning Generation capability; 3) Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) data; 4) a situational awareness capability (mesoscale); 5) significantly better severe and hazardous weather prediction and detection algorithms; 6) algorithms that provide information to forecasters on winter weather phenomena; and 7) algorithms that provide information to forecasters on larger scale phenomena such as MCSs and derechoes.
It is our goal to develop the Next Generation WDSS to be NSSL's and the National Weather Service's platform for testing severe weather applications. To help with this process we plan to develop two versions of it, one that will reside within AWIPS and the other a stand alone system. The version that will reside within AWIPS will be a component of the System for Convection Analysis and Nowcasting (SCAN), which is a prototype for applications to be transferred to AWIPS. In addition, we are designing into both systems the capability to access data from both AWIPS and WSR-88D in real-time and from archive which will allow forecasters, researchers, and algorithm developers the capability to develop and test algorithms and other applications on the same platform, which we believe will greatly enhance the technology transfer process