2.3 A Unified Approach to Verification

Jensen, Tara, National Center for Atmospheric Research and Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), Bonny Strong, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)/Global Systems Division and DTC, Ivanka Stajner, NOAA/Office of Science and Technology Integration, Fanglin Yang, and Geoff Manikin, NOAA/Environmenal Modeling Center

The need to simplify the U.S. National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) production suite and accompanying infrastructure was identified both by several committees and working groups in 2015. The goal of the unification is to facilitate evidence based decision making with regards to model and forecast upgrades and to allow for a broader community approach to model improvements. The initial focus of unification is on the global and regional numerical weather prediction scales but is expected to eventually extend to climate scales as well. The unification is being performed through a combined effort between the Developmental Testbed Center and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Next Generation Global Prediction System (NGGPS) program.

The NGGPS Verification and Validation 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. Phase 1 of this effort is nearing completion and includes methodologies taken from many aspects of the verification community. This presentation will provide an overview of the system and how it will benefit both the government labs and centers but also the research community.