The 2018 DTC Community Workshop on Unified Forecast System Test Plan and Metrics for Model Validation and Verification: Meeting Results and Research to Operations Planning

From July 30 - August 1 2018, the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) gathered a community of scientists for a workshop at the National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCWCP) in College Park, MD, to develop a community test plan with common validation and verification metrics for the emerging Unified Forecast System (UFS). The plan, when complete, will serve as a guide for the weather and climate community for testing and validating new developments for the UFS system and components, and for verifying the UFS for both historical and real-time forecasts using observations and analyses, through standardized hierarchical testing. Metrics for all spatial and temporal scales for numerical models were open for discussion at the workshop, but emerging topics such as the verification of Convective Allowing Models, coupled Earth system models, and ensemble systems were emphasized. During the two and a half days of discussion, meeting participants provided presentations associated with verifying and validating NWP models on various spatial and temporal scales, using both traditional and emerging metric scores. Additionally, attendees gathered for breakout sessions to discuss, and assist in writing, a draft test plan that outlines community-adopted best practices for NWP model validation.

This presentation will summarize the results of the workshop, and research-to-operations planning for community adoption of the test plan and metrics for verification.