[Met_help] Questions Relating to Point_Stat (UNCLASSIFIED)

[John Halley Gotway]

Barbara,

Glad that you're interested in using MET.  I've inserted responses to your questions in-line below:

Sauter, Barbara (Civ, ARL/CISD) wrote:
> Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED 
> Caveats: NONE
> 
> I'd love to use the MODE tool eventually, but initially I would like to
> run the Point_Stat tool, and I am one of those people who don't learn
> particularly well from written instructions only.
> 
> I have PrepBUFR and wrfout files for the same date/times, and to start
> with would basically like to generate old-school mean error-type
> statistics for all the parameters in all the observations available in
> the PrepBUFR files, within a mask_poly for my WRF area of coverage.
> 
> Is there someone who runs Point_Stat regularly who might have sample
> PB2NC configuration files, Point Stat configuration files, and WRF Post
> Processor wrf_cntrl.parm files, other than the default ones?

We can help you via MET-Help to set up the configuration files in the way you want.  You can find an online tutorial for MET here:
http://www.dtcenter.org/met/users/support/online_tutorial/index.php
It may provide you with other examples of the configuration files.

Regarding how to run WPP, you could refer to the WRF-NMM online tutorial here:
http://www.dtcenter.org/wrf-nmm/users/OnLineTutorial/NMM

> 
> Do I need to generate separate output files from PB2NC and from WPP for
> each individual time I want to evaluate?

MET reads gridded input data from files in GRIB1 format which is the output format of WPP.  So any gridded data you'd like to use with MET should be run through WPP to put the data on a regular grid
in GRIB format.  And yes, you'll need to run the PrepBufr files through PB2NC each time.

Once you set up the configuration files you'd like to use, I'd suggest scripting the commands so that you don't need to type them in manually each time you'd like to run MET.

> 
> I see the default point_stat configuration file indicates that a
> threshold has to be entered for each verification field entered.  What
> if I just want ME, MAE, RMSE values for continuous variables?

If you're only interested in the statistics for continuous variable, you can turn off the output of everything other than the CNT (continuous) line type in the "output_flag" variable.  However,
Point-Stat will still ask that you supply at least one threshold.  Just go ahead and put in some default threshold value (for example, "ge0.0").  Since you aren't requesting thresholded output stats,
no thresholding will actually be performed.  If I remember correctly, we ask that at least one threshold be listed to simplify the code and allocate memory appropriately.  Sorry that's its misleading
in this case.

Feel free to write with any other questions that arise in running MET.  We'd be happy to help.

John Halley-Gotway
johnhg at ucar.edu

> 
> Thank you,
> Barb Sauter
> US Army Research Laboratory
> (575) 678-2840
> bsauter at arl.army.mil
> 
> 
> Classification:  UNCLASSIFIED 
> Caveats: NONE
> 
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