Abstract: The Weather Forecast Office (WFO) faces a stream of observations spread over a
large area of water and land, and highly clustered in time. It must be
constantly aware not only of current conditions within its area of
responsibility (AOR), but also of what is moving into and out of its AOR, and
how conditions are changing within its AOR. SAFESEAS is an AWIPS decision
assistance tool engineered to ... continuously monitor marine and adjacent overland
conditions for specific marine weather hazards. It automatically alerts the WFO
whenever such conditions are detected. SAFESEAS provides capabilities to
display observed marine conditions in ways that help the WFO focus on what it
considers most important. To facilitate awareness of conditions moving into and
out of its AOR, SAFESEAS provides the WFO the ability to customize which
station's observations are monitored for each zone in its AOR. SAFESEAS also
provides the WFO the ability to customize the thresholds at which conditions
will be considered threatening and the thresholds at which conditions will be
considered hazardous. This threshold customization may be done on a zone by
zone, variable by variable, and product by product basis. To help the WFO
maintain awareness of how conditions are changing within its AOR, SAFESEAS
provides time trend plots of marine observations. Thus SAFESEAS assists the WFO
in making faster, earlier, and higher-quality decisions regarding marine
watches and warnings, and thus contributes to "no surprises" marine
watch/warning service.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/mdl/safeseas/