Don Moore
National Weather Service Weather Forecsat Office
Billings, Montana

There is a variety of information available on the internet to help assist forecasters in creating medium range forecasters that are not available in AWIPS. However to access much of the data, forecasters need to view web pages from many different sources such as HPC and MDL. This can be a time consuming task and all of the information can be difficult to comprehend since it is scattered throughout many different web pages. To help alleviate this problem, a perl script was developed that acquires temperature data from several web page sources and displays on a single web page. The script takes about a minute to acquire all of the information, but since the data is consolidated forecasters can interpret the data quicker than could have been done otherwise. Among some of the temperature data displayed are the 00Z GFS ensemble MOS extremes and averages, the operational 00Z GFS, and HPC’s 3-7 day forecast (Figure 1). All of the individual members are also displayed so that forecasters can see exactly what each member is predicting (Figure 2). Links to HPC’s “medium range graphic descriptive”, HPC’s 500mb height forecast, along with the 00Z GFS MSLP/QPF and 500mb height forecasts from each ensemble member are also provided to better understand the temperature predictions. The GFS MOS data are available between 0930Z and 1000Z and the HPC temperature forecast data are available between 1430Z and 1500Z. Running the script will always acquire the latest data.

This script is run using a web browser, preferably Internet Explorer, in the cgi-bin directory of the intranet (the author runs the script in cgi-bin/mos). The script is easily configured to display the locations the user desires by just modifying two lines. These two lines in the script are shown below.

Line 17: @all_mos_points = ("LVM", "BIL", "MLS", "BHK", "SHR");
This line is used to determine which MOS sites are displayed. Locations should be in all caps, surrounded by quotes, and separated by a comma.

$hpc_forecast_points = ("MLS|BIL|SHR");
The line is used to determine which HPC forecast points are displayed. Locations should be in all caps and separated by the pipe symbol. The entire string should be surrounded by quotes.