Fostering National and International Collaboration through the Enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus)

Verification and validation activities are critical for the success of modeling and prediction efforts at organizations around the world, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US military, commercial entities, and academia. Over a decade ago, the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) released a suite of community tools called the Model Evaluation Tools (MET). Under the auspices of the US Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) program an endeavour was undertaken to develop a comprehensive verification capability for the Unified Forecast System based on MET. Development of this extended capability, called METplus, started in 2015. A team of developers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), NOAA, and DTC have been working together to rapidly address the needs of both the research and operations communities to provide and operations-to-research-to-operations (O2R2O) tool.

The METplus system is developing into an umbrella verification, validation and diagnostic tool for use by not only NGGPS, the Unified Forecast System (UFS), but also across many other US and international organizations. These tools are designed to be highly flexible to allow for quick adaption to meet additional evaluation and diagnostic needs. A suite of python wrappers have been implemented to facilitate a quick set-up and implementation of the system, and to enhance the pre-existing plotting capabilities.

This presentation will provide an update on the current status of METplus and how it is being used in across multiple scales and applications. It will highlight examples of METplus applied to verification and validation efforts throughout the international community 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).