Simplifying the R2O Process through Unified Verification

The need to simplify the NCEP production suite and accompanying infrastructure was identified both by the Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) Verification and Validation (V&V) team in response to the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research Community Advisory Committee for NCEP (UCACN) Model Advisory Committee (UMAC) report released on December 2015. The UMAC report includes many references to “evidence driven decision making” and “improved verification and diagnostic methods.”  Both the global and regional NWP sections include recommendations to unify verification; with the regional section stating “We recommend that NCEP unify its verification systems, and migrate toward a community verification system, based on infrastructure such as MET and METViewer, with comprehensive and regionally specific statistics”.

The NGGPS V&V team reviewed many different options for building the capabilities needed to support NGGPS through a unified software package.  They decided to base the unified system on the existing Model Evaluation Tools (MET) package supported by DTC, along with its associated interactive web-based aggregation and visualization package METViewer. The unified system is called MET+, which reflects the use of MET and METViewer at the core with a set of flexible python-based scripts to wrap the system.  The goal of the new system is to bring together critical existing capabilities into a single well-maintained and community supported package.  The target for the first phase of this multi-year project is to replicate the functionality of the EMC Global Climate and Weather Modeling Branch (GCWMB) Verification pages to support the NGGPS mission.  Then working from this base the focus will shift to other forecast scales and evaluation of the coupled global system (e.g. with Oceans, Waves, Hydro, Aerosols, etc) as defined by the other NGGPS teams and NCEP users.  This presentation will provide an overview of the system, the development progress to date and examples from the initial system.