# Presentation: 496229

## IFPS Issues at NWS Charleston SC:Getting to IOC and Beyond

- Dan St. Jean
- Science and Operations Officer
- NWS Charleston SC

## ***DISCLAIMER***

- Many of these topics and questions will likely have been discussed or answered at the workshop by the time of this presentation—please bear with me!

## IOC: MORE QUESTIONS AND NEW ISSUES THAN ANSWERS

- Workload
- Lead Forecasters MUST know how and when to delegate
- Office automation is often a beneficial by-product of increased workload
- Training
- What are the training priorities the next several months---IFPS/GFE or meteorology and hydrology?

## IS EVERYONE ON THE SAME PAGE?

- Still some knobology issues (bad habits die hard)
- Incorrect time spans of POP and WX grids
- Not populating Day 7 night period
- Forecasters still not grasping “floating” grids concept (e.g., floating POPs)
- Do all the ops staff members know where we’re headed the next few months? Or the next year?

## WORKLOAD ISSUES

- Staffing
- Which hours of the day do we have adequate staffing for spending necessary time editing Days 4-7 grids?
- Is there too much IFPS workload alone for one person to handle during severe weather?
- Again---A lot of responsibility will fall on the Lead Forecaster

## WORKLOAD ISSUES (cont.)

- HMT/Intern involvement in grid editing
- Eases forecaster workload
- HMT/Intern ownership of important work
- Caveats:
- Amount of involvement cannot be mandated from Regional or National levels
- Depends on skill/experience levels
- Must be time for adequate training

## WORKLOAD ISSUES (cont.)

- Time Issues
- Where did the time go for assessing the observational and forecast data (i.e., the meteorology)?
- Where’s the time for the Forecast Discussion? (Opens a can of worms)

## MEDIUM RANGE FORECASTS

- “It’s the latest model run, so it must be the best...”
- Is the following perception or fact?
*The medium range forecast is equally as important as the short range.*
- Bottom line:  We could either spend minutes or hours in medium-range grids
- MUST FIND A HEALTHY COMPROMISE

## COLLABORATION

- Better use of ISC grids to cut down on time-consuming chat where possible
- Having OPC/MPC in on chat collaboration could shave valuable minutes off twice-daily hotline coordination calls.

## COLLABORATION (cont.)

- What _I_ want to know:
- Now that the forecasters are rather familiar with GFE, will the inordinate amount of time which had been spent learning ‘the science of clicking’ be replaced by an equally inordinate amount of time spent in collaboration?

## QPF GRIDS

- Which is worse:  Too much time or too little time spent on them?
- Have seen some of both at CHS
- Having HPC grids for initialization will be a real help

## FIRE WEATHER GRIDS

- What gridded data do the users _need_?
- What gridded data do the users want?
- What gridded data does ERH/NWSH want?

## MARINE GRIDS

- Forecasting air temps over the ocean---what’s the forecaster skill?
- Forecasting visibility over the ocean---what’s the knowledge base for this?
- How do I train my staff?

## MARINE GRIDS (cont.)

- “The TPC grid nightmare”
- WFOs urgently need GFE tools/resources to merge TPC gridded wind fields into existing WFO wind fields
- Interpolation in time
- Interpolation in space
- Probabilistic forecasts ****** **Deterministic grids
- Does the public have any idea of our confidence levels?
- Tropical Cyclone Working Group recommendations forwarded to Regional MSDs

## SMART TOOLS

- CHS needs to implement and/or develop more
- Too much (or too little) time spent with:
- Sky cover grid
- Weather grid
- Temperature grid

## FSL GFE FORMATTERS

- Forecasters must realize FSL formatters are not a panacea
- Will eliminate need for editing matrix data
- Already some good inter-office sharing going on, but this effort could be coordinated better (as has been done with Smart Tools) to reduce duplication of effort

## IOC

- CHS is developing its own specific implementation strategy
- Establish timeline
- Establish short-term and long-term goals
- Determine training necessary to achieve IOC goals
- Determine best arrangement of shift duties and shift hours
- Think beyond September 30th