A Community Effort for Convection Allowing Mode (CAM) Scorecarding

The use of scorecards to synthesize the skill of a forecast system has been suggested in literature describing best practices for designing ensemble prediction systems (Sandgathe et al., 2011, Sandgathe et al., 2013) but also deterministic systems. Scorecards have been used in the development of the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) Global Forecast System (GFS – Yang, 2010-2017 and Zhou et al., 2016) and a data assimilation framework (Kuhl et al., 2013). The National Center for Atmospheric Research/Research Application Laboratory (NCAR/RAL), through the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), has been using scorecards for synthesizing the results of extensive testing and evaluation for many years. Examples of these scorecards can be found in final reports on the DTC website (Wolff et al., 2010-2017). Recently, the Warn on Forecast (WOF) project has started developing scorecards for Convection Allowing Models (CAMs) providing forecasts on the 0-6hr time frame (Heinselman, 2017). Analogously, NCAR/RAL and the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) have been awarded a grant to pursue CAM scorecarding through the Hazardous Weather Testbed (HWT). This presentation will introduce the idea of scorecarding and update the community on what our initial steps are to apply it to CAMs.