“This effort started in the field. So my first encounter with the blend was with the Central Region and specifically the Sullivan forecast office. ... There was a number of issues that were being addressed here, and what I heard directly from the folks out in the field, as the blend gained popularity. First of all there is this consistency aspect trying to blend across the boundaries of the WFOs themselves so that we would not be building in these political boundaries into the NDFD grid sets. This as it turned out was an important complaint that was being levied against the weather service at large. … We then built this into the roadmap with the idea that we would provide a national basis for the blend, not just the individual efforts across the weather service. There were several reasons for that. I believe that from a scientific point of view, I believe this very strongly, I have said this in the past, you really need to start large and then work into the local areas. This is what synoptic and mesoscale meteorology has always been about and rather than trying to build up this national map from cobbling together 122 different WFO analyses. So it did provide a stronger basis moving forward in that regard.”