Innovative Extensions of Current Verification Capabilities in the Model Evaluations Tools

The Model Evaluation Tools (MET) is supported to the community by the Developmental Testbed Center and has become a cornerstone tool in a growing number of testing and evaluation systems. MET is free to download and also used world-wide by over 2,700 registered users, including university students and faculty, government labs and forecast centers. MET is based on the NCEP verification system and designed to evaluate gridded forecasts with either gridded or point observations. It has grown to support the calculation of over 50 traditional statistics along with providing a subset of non-traditional methods to the community.

The verification team within DTC has been working closely with MET users on understanding their needs and helping them accomplish their verification goals. Sometimes this requires thinking outside the intended purpose of a given MET tool. These include the application of MET-TC (for tropical cyclones) to extra-tropical cyclones as well as renewables forecast. Also, a methodology has been developed to use the analysis tools in MET to evaluate point datasets, such as innovations extracted from the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) diagnostic files. This presentation will demonstrate the above stated applications and, if time allows, a few other ways MET could be used to evaluate models in a unique way.