A comparison of the Model Evaluation Tools (MET) with NCEP EMC and NHC Verification Systems

Tara Jensen
DTC
2:30 pm November 6 in Room 2155

Abstract:
The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) serves as a bridge between research and operations for numerical weather forecasts. Thus, the DTC staff have developed and incorporated a number of strategies for doing meaningful evaluations of these forecasts to ensure that the weather community can trust that real and significant improvements are realized prior to operational implementation. Use of appropriate metrics; accurate estimates of uncertainty; consistent, independent observations; and large, representative samples are essential elements of a meaningful evaluation. Spatial, temporal, and conditional analyses should be incorporated wherever appropriate.

Numerous new methods have been proposed to improve quantification and diagnoses of forecast performance with use of spatial, probabilistic, uncertainty and ensemble information. The complexity of these methods makes verification software development difficult and impractical for many users. Further, verification results using the same methods may not be comparable when different software is used. To address these issues, community verification software has been developed through a joint partnership between the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) and the Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) to provide a consistent and complete set of verification tools. This software package, the Model Evaluation Tools (MET; http://www.dtcenter.org/met/users/index.php), is free, configurable, and supported by the DTC and has been adapted to work with an ever-increasing variety of forecast and observation types, including a tool for evaluating tropical cyclone track and intensity (MET-TC). New verification methods and dataset options are added each year, with input from the community and from developments in the published literature.

Several years ago, METv3.0.1 was directly compared with the NCEP Verification System (NVS) and Quantitative Precipitation Forecast (QPF) Verification System (QVS). Both systems provide the means to generate partial sums or matched pairs from which standard statistics can be derived. This evaluation was performed on a subset of the 2007 DTC Core Test and successfully demonstrated the ability of MET to reproduce verification metrics similar to the metrics generated by NVS and QVS. The results of the study were provided to NCEP EMC as well as published to the MET website in 2011 (http://www.dtcenter.org/met/users/docs/write_ups/dtc_ncep_201109.pdf). Similar comparisons were performed for the MET-TC (v4.0.1) tool as compared with the National Hurricane Center (NHC) verification package. The dataset compiled for the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Program (HFIP) 2012 Retrospective Tests. This evaluation showed the output from MET-TC was consistent with those from the NHC package. This presentation will provide an overview of these two evaluations. Similarities and differences between the packages will be discussed. This seminar will be followed by a brief introduction on how to set up MET and its configuration files along with a question and answer session.



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