Assessing Space Weather Prediction Center Products using the NCAR Model Evaluation Tools
Abstract
Model Evaluation Tools (MET) is a highly-configurable, state-of-the-art suite of verification tools developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and the Development Testbed Center. METplus wraps these tools with python, allowing for complex verification workflows to be simplified and adding generalized capability to read any model data source with user-written python codes. While MET and METplus were originally developed for verification and evaluation of atmospheric numerical weather prediction models, METplus is being continually developed and expanded into new prediction domains, such as subseasonal-to-seasonal forecasts, aerosols and air quality, and hurricanes. Through funding from the Commercial Weather Data Program (CWDP)'s public-private partnership, NCAR and NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) are collaborating to expand MET into the space weather domain. This conference paper summarizes progress toward this goal, provides initial evaluation results of a leading space weather model, and outlines plans for future MET development and space weather evaluation.
Work to date has focused on adapting METplus's grid-to-grid tool to evaluate the impact of radio occultation (RO) measurements on modeled ionospheric Total Electron Content (TEC). To accomplish this, we are evaluating several SWPC runs of the GloTEC model assimilated with and without COSMIC RO observations for several past space weather events. MET allows the results to be stratified by region, by the number of observations per voxel (via a time-varying quality flag field), and to be compared with climatological values. We are developing new evaluation protocols to further assess the impact of RO observations in other contexts, (e.g., near and far from ground ionosonde stations, over ocean or land, by solar zenith angle, etc.). A METplus use case is being developed for the space weather community to illustrate the METplus workflow for an end-to-end evaluation from model data to standard metrics and plots. Future work will use MET to evaluate the quality and impact of vendor-provided CWDP RO data.- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMSA11C3228J
- Keywords:
-
- 7924 Forecasting;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7949 Ionospheric storms;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7969 Satellite drag;
- SPACE WEATHER;
- 7984 Space radiation environment;
- SPACE WEATHER