Friday, 16 August 2002: 11:15 AM
GFE-Based Temperature Verification-One Approach
Forecast Systems Laboratory's (FSL) GFE grid development system enables NWS field offices to both create and verify detailed forecast grids on an areal basis, rather than verify at pre-selected sample points (the traditional method). Forecasters can see the geographical distribution of errors on any desired sub-region of the forecast area, such as by elevation, or above snow cover, in cloudy areas, etc. This capability is made possible by GFE's Smart Tool methodology. This article decribes how temperatures were verified at WFO Boise. Verifying grids had to be chosen or constructed from other sources, such as future model initial fields, ADAS, or tabulated temperature summaries, which themselves had to be analyzed to a grid. GFE, together with AWIPS, allows results to be presented in many ways beyond the standard statistical measures, such as frequency distributions by error value. Once the forecasts were evaluated, they could be graphically adjusted to fit the observed values while still retaining their original details, with those "improved" forecasts serving as the starting point for later forecasts, promising better verification of those forecasts, and so on.
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