METplus: A Comprehensive Verification System for NWP Expanding into Fire Weather

The enhanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus) system was originally designed to address weather prediction needs from 1-120 hours. Over the past 15+ years of development it now serves the short-term to climate prediction community in evaluation ranging from 1-15 minute renewable energy forecasts to multi-decadal climate prediction. METplus provides model testing, evaluation, and verification approaches can be based on gridded forecasts and either a gridded analysis or point-based observations. The system also incorporates tools for aggregating statistics and plotting graphical results. These tools are designed to be highly flexible to allow for quick adaption to meet additional evaluation and diagnostic needs. A suite of Ppython wrappers have been implemented in METplus to facilitate a quick set-up and implementation of the system, and to enhance the pre-existing plotting capabilities.

The Colorado Fire Prediction System (CO-FPS) project developed a coupled atmospheric-fire spread model based on incorporating the CAWFE (Coupled Atmosphere-Wildland Fire Environment) model into the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. METplus was used to assess the system performance using traditional statistics (e.g., RMSE and Frequency Bias) to examine fire impacts on the atmospheric forecast. METplus was also adapted to analyze the fire spread through the use of contingency statistics (e.g., Critical Success Index) and object-based verification, specifically the Method for Object-based Diagnostics Evaluation (MODE) - Time Domain (MTD). In addition to firespread models, METplus can provide verification statistics on typical forecasts of fire weather concerns including humidity and wind speed/direction. This presentation will highlight recent applications of METplus to Fire Weather.