Enabling the Verification and Validation of Environmental Prediction Systems Using the Model Evaluation Tool Software Suite and Amazon Web Services

In May of 2017, the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) re-organized, and established the new Verification, Post-Processing, and Product Generation Branch (VPPPGB). In part, the new branch was created as part of a decision to recognize the growing weather community emphasis on the verification and post-processing products derived from environmental prediction models. As the global weather enterprise and the Unified Forecast System (UFS) community continues to evolve towards expecting more nuanced, and detailed, derived data from increasingly high resolution forecast systems, the need for verifying products has grown substantially, especially to support the NWS’s Impact-Based Decision Support Services structure and provide model performance information.

The new VPPPG Branch is therefore designed to help EMC organize towards supporting current and new verification efforts. In a strong partnership with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, EMC is moving towards using the Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) software suite to verify all of it’s prediction systems, and to enable these algorithms to be used by the community-developed Unified Forecast System. In addition, in a partnership with NCAR, the Global Systems Division, and the Meteorological Development Laboratory, the METViewer and METExpress web-based user interfaces for plotting and mining verification data from METplus was enabled on the cloud via Amazon Web Services. This presentation will illustrate how these projects will enable and accelerate the capability of the UFS community to test, verify, and validate environmental prediction systems.