Individualized Weather Information in the DWD Warning Portal

The DWD warning portal (“DWD-Warnportal”) is a web app developed by the German Meteorological Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD), targeting users with specialized warning information needs related to their particular weather-dependent applications. The portal thus complements the standardized DWD weather warnings, which are based on a catalogue of fixed hazard-related warning criteria. The DWD warning portal user group, for instance from the field of disaster management, needs warning information beyond fixed warning thresholds. The goal to provide individualizable warning information is embedded in the program RainBoW (“Risk-based, Application-oriented and INdividualizaBle Provision of Optimized Warning Information”), which is renewing the warning system of the DWD. 

In this contribution, we present the current state of the DWD warning portal prototype. The web app provides warning information for a set of preconfigured warning thresholds, which may differ from the standardized DWD weather warnings. Besides this, users can customize the evaluated area, weather model, and spatial aggregation measures. In addition to the individualization aspect, another key advantage of the warning portal is that the derivation of weather warning information is based on ensemble data. Hence, all provided results include the respective occurrence probabilities, allowing the users to make more informed decisions.

To obtain a final product tailored to the needs of the target group, the DWD warning portal team follows a cyclic development strategy. First, a lightweight prototype is implemented. Then, access to this prototype is granted to a growing group of test users, representing a broad set of targeted application areas. In annual workshops and follow-up questionnaires, feedback is gathered from these test users, which is then used as a guidance to prioritize which features should be implemented next. Then, the cycle starts again. After implementing a DWD warning portal configurator, which will enable users to save their own persistent warning profiles, plans for future releases include providing push options of warning reports on various media channels