Forecaster Workstation Design: Concepts and Issues

Abstract

Some basic ideas about designing a meteorological workstation for operational weather forecasting are presented, in part as a complement to the recently published discussion of workstation design by R. R. Hoffman. Scientific weather forecasting is defined and used as a basis for developing a set of necessary structural capabilities in a workstation. These capabilities include: built-in excess capacity for flexibility, user-defined product menus, interactivity at the level of being able to change the data as well as analyzed fields, and a software suite of operators by which virtually any product can be custom built through concatenation of mathematically defined operations on any of the data resident within the workstation. The need for user involvement is stressed by showing an example of a real forecaster ?workstation? that successfully provided most of these capabilities and, in contrast, by pointing out the flaws in the current National Weather Service operational workstation's development. In order to provide a system of maximum value, the users must be intimately involved in the process of system design, which virtually precludes the standard federal procurement process. A process of hardware and software purchases ?off the shelf? is advocated, in combination with the establishment of on-site expertise to craft locally tailored workstations. The implications for the future of operational weather forecasting are discussed.