New topics required for marine meteorological warnings, forecasts and sea - ice services

[david-i-berry]

There is a requirement for WMO Members to provide the following services for the high seas:

• Meteorological warnings
• Marine forecasts
• Sea-ice information services

(See Manual on Marine Meteorological Services (WMO-No. 558, provision 1.2). These are currently exchanged on the WIS and in order to migrate to WIS2 topics need to be specified, an example message is given below. The topics need to be agreed in consultation with the Standing Committee on Marine Meteorological Services and the Worldwide Met-ocean Information and Warnings Services (WWMIWS) sub-committee.

FQFJ40 NFFN 170900

RNZI

 MARINE WEATHER BULLETIN

ISSUED FROM THE NATIONAL WEATHER FORECASTING CENTRE NADI

AT 1:30AM ON MONDAY THE 17TH OF MARCH 2025

SITUATION:

A TROUGH OF LOW PRESSURE LIES SLOW MOVING OVER THE EASTERN PARTS OF

THE COUNTRY. ASSOCIATED CLOUD AND SHOWERS ARE EXPECTED TO AFFECT

PARTS OF THE GROUP TILL THE NEXT FEW DAYS.

FORECAST TO MIDNIGHT TONIGHT FOR FIJI WATERS:

EASTERLY WINDS 10 TO 15 KNOTS.

MODERATE SEAS.

FURTHER OUTLOOK:  EASTERLY WINDS 10 TO 15 KNOTS. MODERATE SEAS.

[amilan17]

https://wwmiws.wmo.int/

Pakistan is planning on publishing notifications to ../weather/advisories-warnings

[tomkralidis]

TT-WISMD 2025-03-18:

• need to assess how many messages are being published through origin/a/wis2/+/data/core/weather/advisories-warnings
• ACTION @josusky to assess and report

[josusky]

I can see for last full week (7 days from 2025-03-11T00:00:00 to 2025-03-17T23:59:59) under origin/a/wis2/+/data/+/weather/advisories-warnings 31551 WNMs, that is approximately 187 notifications per hour, or 3 per second.
BTW, approximately 95% of it was from a single center "hk-hko-swic", that is from the topic origin/a/wis2/hk-hko-swic/data/core/weather/advisories-warnings. I have checked also older statistics records, the amount of notifications was very similar.

[josusky]

To sum it up, I am inclined to prefer solution with additional sub-topics, because I can imagine that the consumers of the marine advisories could be somewhat concerned about the amount notifications related to SWIC data that they would need to filter out on client side.

I have briefly checked what is coming from SWIC, there are:

• Public warnings (e.g. about a blizzards, floods, icy roads, dust storms, rain - in some cases only 20mm in 12h)
• Small aircraft advisories
• Small craft advisories (for boats, with information about wave height in feet)
• Wind advisories (gusts up to 30mph - is this grave enough to be a CAP?)
• Frost advisories (33 Fahrenheit, OMG is that a legal unit?)

Jokes about imperial units aside, it seems to me that many of the things are not time critical. I know, that is not our job to asses it, but as a citizen I am concerned that important warnings can be buried under a heap of ordinary data.
Any way, there are clearly multiple categories of data so some sub-topics would make sense.

[tomkralidis]

TT-WISMD 2025-05-27:

• needs input from expert/domain community
• ACTION: @amilan17 to discuss w/ @david-i-berry for identifying experts for review and developing the new topics
• we need to consider how advisories/warnings are defined for all Earth system disciplines (or not)

[maaikelimper]

FYI This issue came up during the WIS2 Training Guangzhou as I discussed with the expert from Pakistan who has prepared his WIS2 Node using wis2box, and is publishing both Marine Bulletins and CAP Alerts, so he ends up with 2 datasets using the same channel:

I know this is theoretically allowed... but can we confirm that this is the preferred way of the community for sharing this data ? To me it feels like separate channels for these data types would make more sense...

Perhaps a topic under "experimental" could be used until the consultation with the WWMIWS sub-committee has taken place ?

[david-i-berry]

This is something that needs to be discussed with SC-MMO and the METAREA coordinators. Both predictions (or forecasts) and advisories and warnings are included in the bulletins as per my comments at the start of this issue. I would have thought weather is the appropriate domain as both the forecasts and advisories/warnings relate to weather (but this needs confirming).

Responsibility for different METAREAS lie with different Members:

I would expect the centre distributing the bulletins to belong to the respective Member and not SWIC. Timeliness is also critical.

[amilan17]

The WIS2 Topics should be aligned with the requirements in the WMO publications. They are copied here for reference.

Therefore, perhaps the topics should be:

• /ocean/advisories-warnings/meteorological
• /ocean/advisories-warnings/sea-ice-information
• /ocean/forecasts

The Manual on WIPPS (WMO-No. 485):

[amilan17]

feedback from WMO colleague:

I see a route : origin/a/wis2/+/data/core/weather/advisories-warnings as per https://github.com/wmo-im/wis2-topic-hierarchy/issues/208
And I see your suggestion for separating the warnings/forecasts/sea ice information:
/ocean/advisories-warnings/meteorological;
/ocean/advisories-warnings/sea-ice-information
/ocean/forecasts

I do see Members issue warning/forecasts/sea ice information separately, see https://wwmiws.wmo.int/index.php/metareas/affiche/18

Looking at the topic hierarchy, my understanding for the METAREA bulletins should be centre-id/channel/core/[weather][ocean]/maritime safety information/[warning][forecasts][sea ice information]

My preference is to categorize the bulletins under weather domain even though it is marine, and
The ‘maritime safety information’ is similar to the category ‘aviation’ under ‘weather’, would this be acceptable? With your guidance I can bring this to the AG-WWMIWS-SubC for agreement.