Advancing Capabilities for Verification of Convection-Allowing Models at the Environmental Modeling Center

Legacy verification for regional modeling systems at the National Centers for Environmental Prediction’s Environmental Modeling Center (NCEP/EMC) has largely focused on surface, upper air, and precipitation forecasts. With the availability of storm-scale forecast information such as simulated radar reflectivity and updraft helicity via convection-allowing models (CAMs), there is a need to enhance the objective verification of these models in order to better inform their utility in forecasting as well as development priorities at EMC and its partners.

This presentation will give an overview of plans and efforts to 1) more comprehensively verify operational CAM guidance used for severe convective storm prediction and 2) accelerate the transition of EMC’s verification infrastructure toward the community Model Evaluation Tools (MET) software package. Additionally, this work is being conducted in conjunction with an effort to centralize and revamp EMC’s verification webpages. As such, webpages displaying verification statistics from operational and experimental CAMs developed at EMC are being updated on a daily basis. The statistical comparisons of forecast performance are being displayed in the form of scorecards, time series plots, “dieoff” plots, and performance diagrams.

Examples of these new capabilities will demonstrate how this work has supported the development of the next generation system underpinning convection-allowing numerical weather prediction at NOAA unified under the Stand Alone Regional configuration of the Finite-Volume Cubed-Sphere dynamic core (i.e., FV3-SAR) and the official evaluation for the proposed implementation of the Rapid Refresh (RAP) version 5 and the High Resolution Rapid Refresh (HRRR) version 4. Future plans to extend these efforts to support the development and evaluation of the High Resolution Ensemble Forecast (HREF) version 3 and the Rapid Refresh Forecast System (RRFS) will also be discussed.