Recent Advancements in Verification within the Developmental Testbed Center

Robust testing and evaluation of research innovations is a critical component of the Research-to-Operations (R2O) process and is performed for NCEP by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC).  At the foundation of the DTC testing and evaluation (T&E) system is the Model Evaluation Tools (MET), which is supported to the community through the DTC.  The verification team within the DTC has been working closely with DTC teams as well as the staff at NCEP to enhance MET to better support both internal T&E activities and testing performed in other testbeds (e.g. Hazardous Weather Testbed, Hydrometeorology Testbed).  This presentation will demonstrate several advancements that were made available in the current release (v5.2) and will briefly cover what will be in the next MET release, which is scheduled for this winter (v6.0). These include the ability to run multiple convolution radii and thresholds with one call to the Method for Object-based Diagnostic Evaluation (MODE), enhancements to facilitate storm or cyclone centric evaluations, the enhancements to support evaluation of global domains, support of NetCDF version 4 and python scripting to facilitate running MET systematically.