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?