PSU ReForecast Simulator (PSU-RFS)
A community collaboration led by Penn State University

About the PSU-RFS

Kevin Bowley
Karl Schneider

The ReForecast project began in 2019 as a collaboration between Dr. Kevin Bowley and Karl Schneider, in order to imporve student forecaster education at Penn State. Our work resulted in the development of the Penn State ReForecast Simulator (PSU-RFS), a web-based teaching tool for weather forecasting classes. The PSU-RFS aims to address several primary issues facing student forecasters today: over-reliance on model guidance, data-inequality introduced by paywall-protected sites, and will deliver a means of instant feedback in the form of forecast verification. Instead of forecasting for a real-time event, students will forecast for a weather event from the past while using the ReForecast Simulator. By forecasting for an event from the climatalogical period, we can limit what data is avaialble to students, limiting both what guidance is avaialble to students, and where they can go to find it. Since all students are limited to the same data, this will ideally create a fair and controlled forecast environment, where students can apply conceptual models of the atmosphere.

The PSU-RFS is currently still in development (August 2020) with plans to add more cases in the coming months. Several cases have been used in Meteo 415 already, and more will be tested throughout the fall semester. We hope to add user registration capabilities in the coming months, in order to open the PSU-RFS to the greater meteorological community.

Contact Information: kbowley@psu.edu