Portraying Uncertainty in Battlefield Weather Situational Awareness

Military planning and logistics must account for weather effects on both a strategic and tactical level. There is, however, uncertainty associated with any forecast that confounds planning and decision-making in relation to anticipated weather effects andtheir impacts on equipment and personnel. The Aptima team proposes to develop visualizations of weather uncertainty from forecast data to present information about weather uncertainty to warfighters in a format that can support their decision processes.This decision aid will be designed to help warfighters anticipate the functional effects of weather on their operations so that they can exploit weather-related opportunities and avoid weather-related disruptions. Within this project we will employ methodsof cognitive task analysis to identify decision processes and strategies and the information used in those decision processes as warfighters deal with weather uncertainty. We will also document the informational properties available from current weatherforecasting systems, the nature and sources of uncertainty, and the nature of weather impacts on selected operational systems. We will integrate the products of these analyses into a representation of essential weather information in a manner that supportsthe typical decision processes and strategies of users. We will then develop a visualization prototype for portraying that representational concept.