5.7 EVALUATION OF VARIOUS ALGORITHMS AND DISPLAY CONCEPTS FOR WEATHER FORECASTING Indra Adrianto 1 , Travis M. Smith 2* , Kevin Scharfenberg 2 , and Theodore B. Trafalis 1 1 School of Industrial Engineering, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK, 2 CIMMS/NSSL New applications and display techniques may be tested in real-time or in post-event playback modes. Because applications can be rapidly prototyped in WDSS-II, it serves as an ideal platform to test new concepts in weather data analysis and warning decision-making before they are migrated into operational systems. 1. Introduction During the spring of 2004, a proof-of- concept test of the WDSS-II was conducted at the National Weather Service Forecast Office (NWSFO) in Norman, OK. The goal of this proof-of-concept test was to determine which products may aid forecasters in making more efficient tornado warning and severe thunderstorm warning decisions. This was determined by evaluating the usefulness of WDSS-II multi-sensor applications and display tools in the warning decision-making process. The hands-on evaluation of new products by National Weather Service (NWS) forecasters during the development stage of those products is a critical part of the design process. NSSL is working closely with the NWS’s Meteorological Development Laboratory (MDL) to create a pathway into operations for the best of these new tools (Stumpf et al. 2005). 2. WDSS-II Proof-of-Concept Test The WDSS-II real-time system at the Norman NWSFO was configured to receive data from many sources, including: • base data and derived products from ten WSR-88D radars in and surrounding the Norman NWSFO County Warning Area, • a real-time, dynamically-updating three- dimensional merged grid of reflectivity (Lakshmanan 2003) and reflectivity derivatives from these ten WSR-88Ds, • base data from the Oklahoma City Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR), and Researchers at the University of Oklahoma and the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) research scientists have developed various machine-intelligent algorithms and visualization techniques and have implemented them in the Warning Decision Support System - Integrated Information (WDSS-II; Lakshmanan 2002). The WDSS-II is a multi-faceted system that serves many purposes, such as: • polarimetric base data and precipitation classification algorithm output from the NSSL’s KOUN research radar. New single-radar products used by forecasters during the evaluation period included Azimuthal Shear, Divergence, and Rotation Tracks, which are based on the Linear Least Squared Derivatives application described by Smith and Elmore (2004). Multi-radar, multi-sensor products that were evaluated included grid- based fields of hail diagnosis parameters created from the merged 3D reflectivity (Stumpf et al. 2004) and near-storm environment (NSE) data, and a storm identification, tracking, and diagnosis algorithm (Smith and Stumpf 2005). The WDSS-II display evaluation examined: Continuous panning and zooming, b) Radar volume browsing (Lynn and Lakshmanan 2002), and c) 4D radar analysis tools including 2D cross-section and 3D box cross-section display (Hondl 2002; Stumpf et al. 2004). • data ingest from multiple sensors such as WSR-88D and TDWR radars, surface observations, numerical models, lightning, and satellites; • single- and multi-sensor real-time automated data analysis applications; • a programming interface that allows developers to quickly implement new ideas; • a four-dimensional data display system that allows users to rapidly interrogate data in a number of different ways. *Corresponding Author Address: Travis M. Smith, CIMMS/NSSL, 1313 Halley Circle, Norman, OK 73069; email: Travis.Smith@noaa.gov. For each of these components, we evaluate: a) Does the component provide new information