Human Factors Psychology in the Support of Forecasting: The Design of Advanced Meteorological Workstations

Abstract

Advanced Meteorological Processing (AMP) systems will provide a workstation environment to support the activities of operational forecasters and research meteorologists. AMP system research and development projects are underway at laboratories of the National Weather Service, the U.S. Air Force, and a number of universities and private corporations. AMP systems will integrate artificial intelligence techniques with forecasting procedures, and will support the interpretation and integration of data from new remote sensing satellites and new ground-based radars. This article illustrates human factors research aimed at generating specifications for prototype AMP systems. A task analysis of forecasting deliberations and structured interviews with research meteorologists lead to a number of recommendations about the design of AMP systems, and to some ideas about needed research on graphics displays and the reasoning of expert meteorologists.