Portraying Uncertainty in Battlefield Weather Situational Awareness

The goal of Next Century's comprehensive Weather Risk Analysis and Portrayal (WRAP) solution (as presented in our Phase I proposal) was to provide an easy-to-use, highly intuitive decision support tool that enables decision makers (ranging from the battlefield planner to the warfighter) to effectively incorporate weather-based intelligence, forecasts, and uncertainty into strategic and tactical decisions without requiring prior expertise in the meteorological sciences. The primary proposed objectives for Phase II are to design and implement a fully operational "version 1.0" of our innovative WRAP decision aid, building upon our successful design and prototyping activities conducted during Phase I. We anticipate this yielding a unique, commercially viable product that will effectively meet the needs of the DoD community as well as a wide array of commercial users in a diverse set of weather-sensitive businesses. One other key objective is to formulate a viable approach for the calculation of weather forecast uncertainty for incorporation into the WRAP framework including: a) development of algorithms to compute probability forecasts from an operational weather model (such as GFS) and its ensemble members; and b) development of algorithms to be used to calibrate the probability forecasts.