Warn-on-Forecast System

Warn-on-Forecast is a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research project that aims to increase lead time for tornado, severe thunderstorm, and flash flood warnings. Meteorologists and their tools are good at identifying which days will see severe weather in different regions. But warnings, which serve as an immediate call to action for specific storms affecting specific locations, are usually issued within minutes of local impacts. Warnings have traditionally been based on detection or indicators of severe hazards using National Weather Service (Doppler radars, and trends in yearly-averaged tornado warning lead time reveal this “warn-on-detection” approach has reached a plateau. As one of NOAA’s strategic goals, increasing lead time is intended to reduce loss of life, injury, and damage to the economy.

The Warn-on-Forecast group at NSSL still has many research initiatives to improve WoFS during the coming decade, while we will also work with the National Weather Service to move WoFS toward regular operational use. You can explore WoFS case studies, or even perform one of your own using the links below. Case Studies | Real-time Data Viewer

BLISS researchers often use WoFS data or WoFS-like modeling tools in our work to both help us understand the boundary layer and to help improve representation of the boundary layer in models such as WoFS.