The GFE package enables the meteorologist to input local weather knowledge and experience into the weather forecast process and value-add to the computer model guidance available to them.

Next Generation Forecast and Warning System> Bureau of Meteorology > Weather Services > Public Services

The Bureau of Meteorology is tasked by the Australian Government to provide meteorological services in support of Australia’s national needs. The Bureau’s weather forecasts and warnings are some of the most widely utilised services of Government in Australia. In 2009-10, for example, 300,000 full weather forecasts were delivered to the Australian public, with over 5 million warning and forecast products disseminated by email, facsimile and telephone systems.

There is an ever-growing demand for more detailed and more accurate forecasts to be targeted to more communities and locations. Yet, despite enormous advances in the science of meteorology, most forecasts are still text-based, requiring substantial manual input by forecasters to prepare each forecast.

The Next Generation Forecast and Warning System (NexGen FWS) has been funded by the Australian Government to apply recent advances in science and technology to overcome this fundamental obstacle to service improvement.

To facilitate this service improvement, the concept of a ‘digital forecast database’ has been developed. The database contains highly detailed weather information on grids that cover the whole country at a 6 km spacing. It is a platform from which individual forecast products and services can be generated, including the traditional text format. Human forecasters now concentrate their efforts on the scientific input to this database, rather than on the manual creation of individual text products.

The technology chosen for the task was the Graphical Forecast Editor (GFE), initially developed in the United States by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and implemented operationally in all US National Weather Service forecasting offices.

In 2005, the Bureau commenced a demonstration pilot project and invested $7.6 million to modify, develop, and configure the GFE system to operate under Australian conditions. The pilot system was successfully launched for Victoria on 28 October 2008.

In 2009 the Australian Government announced further funding of $30.5 million for the Next Generation Forecast and Warning System Project, enabling a national roll-out of GFE and other improvements to the tools available to forecasters.

GFE was made operational in New South Wales in September 2010 and is due to be implemented in Tasmania and South Australia in 2011, with Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern

Territory to follow in the 2012 to 2014 period.

What is NexGenFWS?The Next Generation Forecast and Warning System is underpinned by a set of forecast weather element grids for time intervals out to 7 days ahead, initialised from Numerical Weather Prediction models. These are then edited and quality controlled by forecasters using a graphical user interface. This process is a completely new method of forecasting operations for the Bureau of Meteorology.

Each weather element, for each time period, is stored in the Australian Digital Forecast Database at a resolution of 6 km. From these grids, maps are generated for display in the Bureau’s new Forecast ExplorerTM web interface, with more traditional text forecasts also generated by specialised automated text generation software. These text forecasts can then be validated and edited by Bureau forecasters if required.

As well as traditional text forecasts, GFE produces gridded forecasts of meteorological elements that can be used in a variety of ways, depending on the end user requirements.

• Extended forecast outlook period, so that forecasts cover more days;

• Improved accuracy, detail, consistency and presentation of forecast and warning information, including for high impact events such as heavy rain or bushfires;

• Provides digital datasets of geospatially-referenced forecast information, available for users such as emergency services to download

and ingest into standard GIS-based decision support systems and weather presentation software; and

• Is an efficient and extensible platform for producing forecasts and warnings, including industry-standard formats such as XML.

To view the Forecast ExplorerTM and the graphical forecast products, visit: www.bom.gov.au

Next Generation Forecasting and Warning SystemNext Generation Forecast and Warning System

Benefits of the new system

• Provides state-of-the-art forecast services based on a high-resolution digital forecast database and semi- automated text forecast production;

• Ensures equity of service for city and rural communities, with more frequent and detailed services for everyone, not just those living in major cities;

• Provides graphical weather forecasts, with the ability to generate a forecast for any location via a simple ‘point- and-click’ of a mouse;

Graphical weather forecasts provided by the Bureau are available out to 7 days ahead via the web–based Forecast ExplorerTM. This service enables the user to find, display and zoom into weather details for their area down to the 6 kilometre grid scale.