Integrating CI information into a single situational awareness tool

Discussions with forecasters throughout this year's Spring Experiment have raised an interesting topic regarding how to supply information without overwhelming forecasters during forecast and warning operations. In particular, forecasters have expressed interest in looking at all of the background interest fields from the UAH SATCAST product, which is currently being used as a proxy for the GOES-R CI product. The official GOES-R CI product will have 12 interest fields, all with a unique piece of information about the growth of a cumulus cloud object. As defined within the current GOES-R Algorithm Working Group (AWG) requirements, the CI product will only provide the forecasters with a binary yes/no output. Currently being provided within AWIPS/NAWIPS during the Spring Experiment, SATCAST has 6 interest fields that determine whether or not a cloud object is expected to convectively initiate within the next 0-2 hour time-frame. Forecasters have expressed some displeasure with only being provided a yes/no field to help them determine whether CI will occur. Some ideas have been offered that include providing a probabilistic CI nowcast, similar to what UWCI provides, or providing them with all of the CI interest fields individually in addition to the yes/no nowcast. Providing the forecasters with all of the interest fields and expecting them to look at them within their AWIPS/NAWIPS display is not feasible as it will be extremely distracting and time consuming. The problem with providing a probabilistic approach is that you are removing the detailed information that the forecasters would like to see but currently do not have to time to look at. So what do we do?

An interesting solution to this problem arose during a car ride on the way to pick up dinner this evening during a break in EWP operations. Why not provide a display that looks similar to a binary yes/no product, but be able to (on mouse-over perhaps) interrogate all of the interest field information? Currently within AWIPS you are able to do this for a single field. For instance, you can display radar reflectivity and interrogate the actual dBZ value on mouse-over. What if it were possible to provide information from multiple fields on mouse-over in this similar manner while still providing a simple to understand one-size-fits-all display for the product? Some food for thought.