FACETs: A Proposed Next-Generation Paradigm for High-Impact Weather Forecasting

AbstractRecommendations by the National Research Council (NRC), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and Weather-Ready Nation workshop participants have encouraged the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the broader weather enterprise to explore and expand the use of probabilistic information to convey weather forecast uncertainty. Forecasting a Continuum of Environmental Threats (FACETs) is a concept being explored by NOAA to address those recommendations and also potentially shift the National Weather Service (NWS) from (primarily) teletype-era, deterministic watch–warning products to high-resolution, probabilistic hazard information (PHI) spanning periods from days (and longer) to within minutes of high-impact weather and water events. FACETs simultaneously i) considers a reinvention of the NWS hazard forecasting and communication paradigm so as to deliver multiscale, user-specific probabilistic guidance from numerical weather prediction ensembles and ii) pr...