Development of a new Tropical Cyclone Verification Toolkit (MET-TC)

Model Evaluation Tools – Tropical Cyclone (MET-TC) is a new set of tools to aid in tropical cyclone forecast evaluation and verification. This toolkit provides a standard set of verification metrics and comprehensive output statistics, which can be used for homogeneous comparisons of operational and experimental track and intensity forecasts. The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), as part of the Hurricane Forecast Improvement Project (HFIP), developed MET-TC. The primary goal of MET-TC was to replicate the functionality of the current National Hurricane Center (NHC) verification software. The MET-TC code is designed to be modular, allowing additional capabilities and features to be added in future releases. The main functions of the code are to compare ATCF format files, compute pair statistics from independent model input or user-specified consensus forecasts, filter pair statistics based on user specifications, and compute summary statistics. MET-TC utilizes the MET software framework and is available as an open source community verification package through the DTC. An important benefit of the software is its availability to all users, which will enable consistent forecast evaluation studies to be undertaken across the community. The official release of the MET-TC code, documentation, and graphical capabilities are available within MET v4.1. This presentation will highlight the capabilities of the MET-TC toolkit, demonstrate the use of MET-TC using data from the HFIP 2013 Retrospective evaluation, and discuss possible future enhancements to the software. Additionally, information regarding the Tropical Cyclone Modeling Team (TCMT) database housing a full set of HFIP data will be provided to aid in tropical cyclone model evaluations.