Verification of Extreme Precipitation Events

An approach to measuring how well ensemble precipitation forecasts account for the occurrence of extreme precipitation events will be described in this poster. The general approach selects the largest forecast events for a set of hindcasts and then computes a suite of verification statistics for the selected events. This suite includes an experimental set of statistics conditioned on the occurrence of precipitation events larger than a specified threshold. The set of hindcasts used in this work are for daily ensemble forecasts with 50 members at 6hr steps for up to the next 14 days for every day for a 25-yr period. The largest 50 events (conditioned on the forecasts according to specified criteria selected by the user) are selected for input to the verification process.