Lighthouse
Cape Hatteras, North Carolina
Introduction
The Weather Forecast Office (WFO) faces a stream
of observations spread over a large area of water and land, and
highly clustered in time. It must be constantly aware not only of
current conditions within its area of responsibility (AOR), but
also of what is moving into and out of its AOR, and how conditions
are changing within its AOR. SAFESEAS is an AWIPS decision assistance
tool engineered to continuously monitor marine and adjacent overland
conditions for specific marine weather hazards. It automatically
alerts the WFO whenever such conditions are detected. SAFESEAS provides
capabilities to display observed marine conditions in ways that
help the WFO focus on what it considers most important. To facilitate
awareness of conditions moving into and out of its AOR, SAFESEAS
provides the WFO the ability to customize which station's observations
are monitored for each zone in its AOR. SAFESEAS also provides the
WFO the ability to customize the thresholds at which conditions
will be considered threatening and the thresholds at which conditions
will be considered hazardous. This threshold customization may be
done on a zone by zone, variable by variable, and product by product
basis. To help the WFO maintain awareness of how conditions are
changing within its AOR, SAFESEAS provides time trend plots of marine
observations. Thus SAFESEAS assists the WFO in making faster, earlier,
and higher-quality decisions regarding marine watches and warnings,
and thus contributes to "no surprises" marine watch/warning
service.
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