The Future of Statistical Post-processing in NOAA and the Weather Enterprise

Hurricane

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The NOAA / National Weather Service's (NWS) Strategic Plan, "Weather-Ready Nation" envisions NOAA providing dramatically improved weather decision support to its customers through the generation of much more skillful and reliable forecast guidance.  Statistical post-processing of weather forecast guidance (its adjustment using discrepancies between past forecasts and observations/analyses) will be a key component of helping the NWS meet this goal.

Statistical post-processing is aided tremendously when the relevant data is in place, including recent or retrospective forecasts (reforecasts) and associated recent or retrospective observations and analyses.  NOAA intends to generate these data sets more regularly and make them of higher quality and consistency in the future.

This workshop helped NOAA set its future requirements for providing internal and external customers with the high-quality data they needed to achieve expected benefits from statistical post-processing.  The workshop discussed several topics, including: (1) a conversation with internal and external customers about their desires and requirements for data.  For example, what length of retrospective forecast and analysis data was needed?  What storage formats are most convenient?  What regions of the world are needed, and what weather elements are most important to save?  What platforms should host the data, internal NOAA, and/or commercial cloud vendors' platforms? (2) Conversations about how the post-processing community can make more rapid progress through sharing of software, including potentially establishing a community repository of post-processing algorithms, test data sets, I/O routines, verification routines, and so forth. (3) New developments in statistical post-processing, especially ones that may have implications with regards to what data NOAA should store and make available.

Please find documents from the The Future of Statistical Post-processing in NOAA and the Weather Enterprise Workshops below: