P57  Recent Enhancements to the Model Evaluation Tools (MET 4.0)

Fowler, Tressa L. John Halley Gotway, Randy Bullock, Paul Oldenburg, Tara Jensen, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Model Evaluation Tools (MET) is a freely-available software package for forecast verification. It is distributed through the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) for testing and evaluation of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. Development has been led by the community: including WRF users, the DTC, and verification experts through workshops and user meetings.  MET allows users to verify forecasts via traditional, neighborhood, and object-based methods. To account for the uncertainty associated with these measures, methods for estimating confidence intervals for the verification statistics are an integral part of MET.

Many features of the software were presented at past workshops. The latest release includes many new features.  The new Ensemble-Stat tool preprocesses sets of forecasts into ensemble forecasts, including mean, spread, and probability. When observations are included, it will also derive ensemble statistics such as rank histogram and continuous ranked probability score. When accumulating statistics over time, users can now adjust the confidence intervals to account for serial correlation. To assist our WRF ARW users, MET now can read the netCDF output from the pinterp postprocessor. Multi-category, e.g. 3x3, contingency tables are supported, along with appropriate skill scores. Many new preprocessing tools assist users with formatting and examining their observational data for use with MET. The tools reformat MADIS (Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System), TRMM (Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission) and WWMCA (World Wide Merged Cloud Analysis) products and produce plots of many types of observational data sets. These enhancements will be of particular interest for users performing cloud forecast verification. Examples of the existing and new verification capabilities will be shown.