Current and Future Strategies for Verification and Post-Processing of Numerical Weather Prediction Models at the NOAA Environmental Modeling Center

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

The new VPPPG Branch is therefore designed to help EMC organize towards supporting current and new verification and post-processing efforts. This presentation will describe the structure of the new branch, and illustrate verification and post-processing projects that are of interest to the community. For example, in terms of creating a Unified Verification System, EMC is moving towards exclusively using the Model Evaluation Tools (MET+) software system for all models, and through the EMC reorganization, the software will be used to establish the branch as the independent verification component of EMC modeling efforts. Additionally, several post-processing projects are under development at EMC, including a possible re-engineering project of the Unified Post-Processing (UPP) software system, and the development of experimental ensemble probabilistic products for winter weather hazards. A discussion of these topics, future projects, and desired community partnerships with the new branch will be included in the presentation.