Product usage evaluation of the Aviation Gridded Forecast System workstation at the Denver Center Weather Service Unit

This report describes the evaluation of an experimental prototype of the Aviation Gridded Forecast System (AGFS) workstation. The AGFS program, sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration, was established to provide more timely and accurate forecasts of aviation weather (e.g., ceiling, visibility, icing, and turbulence) to the aviation community. In February 1993 the prototype AGFS was installed at the Denver Center Weather Service Unit (CWSU), and since then has been in use by the CWSU meteorologists in their day-to-day forecast process. In order to better understand the types of meteorological products required by the forecasters and to develop workstation requirements for future prototype AGFS workstations, the products selected on the experimental AGFS workstation were evaluated for the period of 11 February through 31 December 1993. Usage logs, the primary analysis tool, are automatically-recorded logs of nearly every selection made on the workstation graphic displays. Products were grouped by type (e.g., radar, surface, and satellite) and scale (e.g., national and regional), and the evaluation covered hourly and monthly totals of products selected. Sub-WFO scale surface products of radar, mesonet, and the Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS) were selected most frequently. This was not surprising since a major focus of the weather support for traffic management in the Denver area was centered around Stapleton International Airport. Also, these products were noted to increase during the summer months, when convection in the Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center plays an important part in management of the air space. Grid-to-graph products, which were not previously available to the CWSU forecasters, were selected infrequently. Discussions with the forecasters disclosed that this was attributed to the need for too many "clicks" to obtain data and the displays of the gridded data were too noisy. Most of this information has been passed on to the developers of the next version of the AGFS workstation.