Individualized weather warnings in the DWD warning portal prototype

Weather warnings are often based on a catalog of hazard-related meteorological thresholds. However, there are weather-dependent applications that need warnings beyond these fixed criteria. In the course of the program RainBoW ("Risk-based, Application-oriented and INdividualizaBle delivery of Optimized Weather warnings") by the German Meteorological Service (DWD), a key field of action is to provide individualized weather warnings to account for specialized application-dependent needs. This will be realized through a warning portal ("DWD-Warnportal"), in which users with specific requirements may configure profiles with individual warning criteria matching their particular use case in terms of warning thresholds and considered areas.

A current light-weight prototype version of the DWD warning portal allows the automated evaluation of probabilistic warning information for a set of preconfigured profiles containing warning criteria that partly differ from the standard warnings of the DWD for the general public. To obtain a final product tailored to the needs of specialized users, access to the prototype was granted to a group of test users from various areas of expertise. This group includes, among others, experts from the field of disaster control, energy network operation, forestry offices, media and academic research. Their feedback through regular user workshops and questionnaires is then used as a guidance to prioritize which additional features should be implemented and in which order. As requested by the test users, the first individual aspect implemented in the prototype is the warning location, which may be defined by an address, geographical coordinates or a GeoJSON polygon. For future releases, it is planned to provide persistent user-configurable profiles, in which the warning thresholds may be adjusted to individual use cases.