Assessing the Performance of NOAA SWPC's Operational Geospace Model

The end user of an operational model will often develop 'rules of thumb' for how well a model performs in different situations. The space weather forecasters at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) have been using output from the Geospace model on a daily basis since the model was first transitioned into real-time operations in October 2016. Over this time the SWPC forecasters have gained an intuitive sense for the overall model performance under various space weather conditions and have developed their own 'rules of thumb' based on their experience using the model. In this presentation we discuss the forecasters' experiential assessment of the Geospace model and compare that to quantified measures of the model performance during the past two years running in real-time operations. We discuss sources of uncertainty contributing to the overall forecast error and examine plans for including new probabilistic forecasts. In addition, we evaluate the regional forecast capability of the Geospace model, an important capability that will be the basis of future operational tools.