The Official Evaluation of the FV3GFS

The FV3GFS is on track to replace the operational GFS in early 2019, as the initial step towards the eventual implementation of the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS). Fanglin Yang of EMC will give an overview of the model in a separate presentation in this symposium of center updates. This presentation focuses on the official evaluation period, a four month opportunity for the field to become familiar with FV3GFS performance throughout all seasons, that has been led by EMC’s Model Evaluation Group, part of EMC’s Verification, Post Processing, and Product Generation Branch.

The evaluation period will be completed by the time of this presentation, and the talk will give an overview of how the evaluation was conducted and an overview of statistical results and important cases from the real-time parallel. In addition, three years’ worth of retrospective runs, covering the three previous wam and cold seasons are being run. They serve the purpose of providing a much longer set of statistics than the four months of the real-time parallel can provide, a long data set for which statistical post-processing products (e.g. MOS) can be calibrated, and an examination of how the new model performs on high-impact cases that have occurred over the past three years. This presentation will give an overview of statistical retrospective performance as well as the critical cases from the three year period, including the historic 2017 Atlantic hurricane season.