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WMO Forecast Demonstration Project: Understanding What the Users of Weather Forecasts Need

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Rendering of Beijing's Olympic Stadium interior. NCAR scientists are part of an international team in Beijing generating very short-term forecasts, known as nowcasts. These forecasts will demonstrate the ability to provide one-to-six-hour notices of local storms. Known as the Forecast Demonstration Project, its intent is to showcase the best forecasting technology, in a "real-world" scenario -- the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

Providing state-of-the-art meteorological forecasts is an obvious and valuable scientific endeavor, but NCAR Scientist Qian Ye of the Center for Capacity Building is studying an often overlooked area: What forecasting products do end-users really need (and this is often a regionally-specific answer); and secondly, how can we help users, especially in developing countries, to better use the valuable weather modeling and forecasting tools that are available?

Qian has become a liason between the WMO's (World Meteorological Organization) demonstration projects and the CMA's (Chinese Meterological Administration) meteorologists, in trying to address these questions. Conducting user surveys and workshops to understand how people in China, from meteorlogists to the general public, obtain and use weather forecast information, he has reached interesting conclusions, and developed a few ideas on how to provide more valuable weather tools to the public.

Here are just a few of Qian's findings:

  • What do users want? Although meteorologists develop models to forecast a wide array of weather phenomenon, end users of these forecasts have very specific desires for certain types of forecasts over others, depending on their region-specific weather events, and their perception of risk. One example is Qian's the finding that in Beijing, CMA meteorologists provide very detailed forecasts of hailstorms, an often sudden and violent occurrence. However, Qian found that the general public does not value these forecasts as highly as meteorologists expected, because they do not perceive the risk from hailstorms to be as highly as other phenomenon. Qian is helping the CMA to develop a new "weather forecasting heirarchy of needs", to help guide forecasting products and information delivery.
  • Weather modeling products are widely available, but users in developing countries often do not have sufficient training on how to use them.
  • Weather modeling products usually have very complicated software interfaces, rendering them unusable for most of the public. User-friendly web interfaces could be developed, allowing a person on a personal computer or cellphone to generate the forecast they need, in real-time.
  • Little has been done to study how consumers of weather information obtain forecasts, and how to target them accordingly. Qian's studies show differences between the older members of the Chinese population, who mainly obtain information from television, and its younger members who obtain most of their information via cellphone text messages and the internet. He helped Chinese officials to plot the demographics of Beijing, showing where concentrations of older and younger citizens lived. This is helping forecasters and public planning officials to understand how to target the delivery of weather information.
  • A majority of the Chinese public believes that their weather forecasts are produced by the TV station, instead of by the scientific endeavors and the powerful modeling products being developed by the CMA (Chinese Meteorological Administration) and other agencies. This can lead to the public placing less value on the scientific work of these agencies, due to lack of understanding the true source of their weather information.
  • The future Chinese Meterological Administration weather service, as Qian sugguested, should include three components, i.e., 1. Forecasting; 2. Improving warning systems and information delivery; and 3. The ability to produce computer simultations of potential impact scenarios from a weather event as it is occuring, in order to assist decision makers in emergency planning in real time.