Introduction to the Workshop
Paul Schultz
Goals
• Survey and discuss progress toward the mandate of communicating uncertainty in weather forecasts
• OS&T asks ISST:– Is probabilistic forecast grid preparation good use
of forecaster time?– What are the best WFO practices in DS today?
Tomorrow?
• GSD asks ISST:– What does your workstation need to do?
Premise
Representing uncertainty in weather forecasts takes three forms: Probabilities, alternative scenarios, and DS by the forecaster
Probabilities
• First workshop focused on probabilistic forecast production– Offered, scrapped, and developed a conceptual
forecast process– Prototyped some tools on ALPS– Worked through two cases– Initiated PFP
• This workshop we’ll show you a lot of that without the hands-on
Alternative scenarios
• Examples: SREF, NAEFS– New NWP products in the works
• Main public sector drivers are aviation and hydrology
• Users looking for effects of weather uncertainty in the context of their DSS
• Private sector: install another server at MDL, they’ll download it all, we’ll never hear a word
• Directly useful in WFO ops?– Absolutely (Lothar case)
Stats from the Lothar storm
• 130 mph gusts in Brittany; 105 mph in Paris; 150 mph in Zurich
• Along with smaller “Martin” storm, 140 dead, 88 in France alone
• 4% of French forests destroyed• 2 million people without electricity• Road, air, train traffic disrupted for days• 5 billion Euro insured loss; ~20 billion total
Lothar storm case
Decision support
• Location-specific– Pablo has hurricanes, Brad has
snowstorms, they do different DS tasks
• User-specific– BOU’s airport snow probabilities, SLC’s ski
resort product, those are different products
• Themes?
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