Recent Advances in METplus Verification and Diagnostic Capabilities

Verification and diagnostic activities are critical for the success of both numerical weather prediction and weather forecasting efforts at research and operational organizations around the world. The enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) system is an umbrella verification, validation and diagnostic tool for use by thousands of users from both US and international organizations. The METplus system consists of several components, including the MET, for the computation of verification statistics based on gridded forecasts and either a gridded analysis or point-based observations. The system also incorporates an analysis suite for aggregating statistics and plotting graphical results. A suite of Python wrappers have been implemented in METplus to facilitate a quick set-up and implementation of the system, and to enhance the pre-existing plotting capabilities. These tools are designed to be highly flexible to allow for quick adaptation to meet additional evaluation and diagnostic needs.

Recently, several organizations within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Department of Defense (DOD), the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), and international partnerships such as Unified Model (UM) Partnership led by the Met Office have adopted the tools for their use operationally and for research purposes. These responsibilities of the groups are vastly different, but the community evaluation framework allows for exploration and understanding of model biases and the consistency of forecasts and simulations. This aids forecasters in understanding how to use the models and derived products, and provides model developers capabilities to explore systematic errors and model deficiencies. Many of these organizations are also now contributing to METplus development, leading to a more robust and dynamic framework for the entire earth system modeling community to use.

This poster will provide an update on the rapidly expanding capabilities of METplus and how it is being used across multiple scales and applications. It will highlight examples of the flexible configurability of METplus to address a range of temporal (hourly forecasts to subseasonal-to-seasonal) and spatial scales (convection allowing to mesoscale, regional to global, tropical to cryosphere to space).