Forecast Model and Product Assessment Project User's Guide

The Mission Execution Modeling Team of the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) has a project to determine the accuracy and value added of the weather models and decision support tools under development. To accomplish this, the team has developed the capability to produce model validation statistics using National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Model Evaluation Tools (MET) software. The MET Point-Stat tool compares weather model output from the Weather Research and Forecast (WRF) model to point weather observations collected from the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System (MADIS) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) PrepBUFR data source. The Point-Stat tool calculates error statistics on the performance of WRF forecasts. The MET Stat-Analysis tool aggregates and summarizes these statistics according to user determined criteria. The data from these summaries are extracted and imported into spreadsheets where they can be visualized in tables and graphs for further analysis. Execution of the data collection programs, MET software and the extraction programs requires the user to run approximately 100 scripts which collect, reformat, organize, execute and extract the results on local workstations and ARL High Performance Computers. To organize and track the process of running these scripts, this User's Guide was developed from internal procedures and checklists. The original document contains color images.