Content area
Full text
This new database capitalizes on the revolutionary way NWS forecasters are working together to make their high-resolution, up-to-date forecasts available to the nation.
Many technological advances and scientific breakthroughs have allowed the National Weather Service (NWS) weather forecasts and warnings to become much more specific and accurate. Better ways of communicating weather information to potential users have been devised. Partnerships with commercial enterprises have been forged as a way for much of the information to flow to the public and other users.
However, the production and dissemination of routine National Weather Service forecasts must keep pace with the need for such information in this digital age. A primary means of providing sensible weather element forecasts (e.g., cloud cover, maximum temperature) from NWS Weather Forecast Offices (WFOs) is still textual in form. The flagship product of the NWS for years has been the zone forecast: a brief, plain-English description of what the weather will be over the next few days for a multicounty area. Similar text, containing much of the same information, is produced to support marine and federal fire weather interests and emergency managers. Some of these products are voiced over the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Radio. In the past, because such textual products have been composed on word-processing equipment, the output of the forecast staff has been essentially limited by typing speed. The new Interactive Forecast Preparation System (IFPS; Ruth 2002) circumvents this, providing not only for familiar textual and voiced products, but also providing in digital (i.e., numerical) form the data from which these products are prepared. These digital forecasts are being put into a National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) and will be made widely available to partners and customers.
Once a database of local forecasts exists at a WFO, today's forecasters can produce textual, graphic, and voiced products automatically by software. In essence, the forecaster now enters the forecast variables in digital form instead of redundantly typing several products containing largely the same information. But the real power of a digital database is that it opens the door for providing much more forecast information and in more useful forms. The NDFD will contain much more data than the NWS was previously able to provide, at timescales as small...