The DWD Warning Portal Configurator for Individualized Weather Warnings and Reports

Warnings issued for the general public do not always meet the specialized needs of users involved in weather-sensitive applications. Therefore, the future warning system of the German Meteorological Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst, DWD), as developed in the program RainBoW ("Risk-based, Application-oriented and INdividualizaBle Provision of Optimized Warning Information"), will have a fully customizable branch. Users will have the opportunity to configure their own parameters and settings to create their own, individually relevant warnings and reports.

This functionality will be provided via the so-called warning portal (“DWD-Warnportal”), which is currently available as a lightweight prototype. First released in 2022 to a small group of test users, a gradually increasing number of test users from various application areas continue to inform the prototype development with their feedback and further requirements. In the current version of the warning portal prototype, users can customize key settings according to their interests. This includes specifying the location (which can be either a named location or a user-provided geometry), the weather element of interest with corresponding pre-configured thresholds, covering a set of relevant value ranges, or the forecast model used to generate the warnings. Based on these user settings, data from the ICON-EU/D2-EPS are used to compute occurrence probabilities for the preconfigured value ranges, which are then shown in a visualization dashboard with a map and a temporal diagram. 

The lightweight prototype of the warning portal does not yet provide full individualization capabilities for warnings and focuses on visualizing probabilistic data for pre-configured meteorological thresholds. Currently, users have to reapply their settings each time they visit the warning portal. However, this will change, once the warning portal configurator becomes available, which allows users to setup and store persistent warning profiles. With the warning profile, users will be able to configure warning location (position or geometries), period, warning element and individual thresholds. At the same time, a new release of the warning portal will introduce the option to evaluate and visualize the forecast data, based on an individual warning profile. Hence, the users will get the possibility to check their own individual warnings at any time.

The poster presents the new configurator to create and manage warning profiles and the way to process and visualize them in the DWD warning portal.