Planning The Next Decade of Coordinated U.S. Research On Minutes-to-seasonal Prediction of High-impact Weather

Abstract

The end of 2014 marked the conclusion of The Observing System Research and Predictability Experiment (THORPEX), a 10-year research and development program organized under the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)/World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) and designed to accelerate improvements in the accuracy and use of 1-day to 2-week numerical weather predictions. As summarized by Chang et al. (2013), proposal development efforts and workshops have been organized to establish three new international 5–10-year THORPEX legacy projects under WWRP. The first two projects, Polar Prediction Project (PPP) and Subseasonal to Seasonal Prediction (S2S), have been formally established with their own International Coordination Office and Implementation Plan. The third, High-Impact Weather (HIWeather), has recently been established and the governance is being finalized at the time of writing. To engage the U.S. research and operational communities in these new legacy projects and begin to articulate a new U.S. science plan, a 1.5-day planning meeting organized by the authors was held on the NOAA Silver Spring metro campus in June 2014. The meeting was held immediately after the Second International HIWeather Workshop—a 3-day meeting that was held at the same venue.