Climo Stats

The goal of this User’s Guide is to provide basic information for users of the Model Evaluation Tools (MET) to enable them to apply MET to their datasets and evaluation studies. MET was originally designed for application to the post-processed output of the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model. However, MET may also be used for the evaluation of forecasts from other models or applications, including the Unified Forecast System (UFS), and the System for Integrated Modeling of the Atmosphere (SIMA) if certain file format definitions (described in this document) are followed.

The MET User’s Guide is organized as follows. Section 1 provides an overview of MET and its components. Section 2 contains basic information about how to get started with MET – including system requirements, required software (and how to obtain it), how to download MET, and information about compilers, libraries, and how to build the code. Section 3 – Section 9 focuses on the data needed to run MET, including formats for forecasts, observations, and output. These sections also document the reformatting and masking tools available in MET. Section 10 – Section 14 focuses on the main statistics modules contained in MET, including the Point-Stat, Grid-Stat, Ensemble-Stat, Wavelet-Stat and GSI Diagnostic Tools. These sections include an introduction to the statistical verification methodologies utilized by the tools, followed by a section containing practical information, such as how to set up configuration files and the format of the output. Section 15 and Section 16 focus on the analysis modules, Stat-Analysis and Series-Analysis, which aggregate the output statistics from the other tools across multiple cases. Section 18 – Section 20 describes a suite of object-based tools, including MODE, MODE-Analysis, and MODE-TD. Section 21 – Section 27 describes tools focused on tropical cyclones, including MET-TC Overview, TC-Dland, TC-Pairs, TC-Stat, TC-Gen, TC-RMW and RMW-Analysis. Finally, Section 28 includes plotting tools included in the MET release for checking and visualizing data, as well as some additional tools and information for plotting MET results. The appendices provide further useful information, including answers to some typical questions (Appendix A, Section 30) and links and information about map projections, grids, and polylines (Appendix B, Section 31). Appendix C, Section 32 and Appendix D, Section 33 provide more information about the verification measures and confidence intervals that are provided by MET. Sample code that can be used to perform analyses on the output of MET and create particular types of plots of verification results is posted on the MET website). Note that the MET development group also accepts contributed analysis and plotting scripts which may be posted on the MET website for use by the community. It should be noted there are References (Section 29) in this User’s Guide as well.