[Met_help] ASCII forecast files

[John Halley Gotway]

Gerald,

We have not put much thought into verifying point forecasts with point observations because we haven't had any requests from users to do so.  MET has initially been developed with the output of WRF in
mind - which produces gridded forecasts.  So there isn't currently anything in MET that would enable to verify them easily.

HOWEVER, I can think of a way how you might trick MET into doing what you'd like.  The "Point-Stat" tool in MET compares a gridded forecast to point observations.  One type of output that Point-Stat
can produce is just ASCII data containing the matched pairs it used in its computations.  We call this output line MPR - for "matched pairs".  Now another MET tool, the "VSDB-Analysis" tool (renamed
to STAT-Analysis in the next release) is able to read those matched pairs and recompute statistics on them.

If you have a set of forecast and observed values already paired together, you could reformat them in ASCII to look like MET's MPR line format.  And then you could read them into the STAT-Analysis
tool and produce some statistics from them.  The verification techniques you can apply to point data are much more limited than those you can apply to gridded data.  But MET would certainly be able to
produce the standard types of verification score with the associated confidence intervals.

Hope that helps.

John Halley Gotway
johnhg at ucar.edu

Gerald van der Grijn wrote:
> This morning I went to Barbara Brown's talk about MET. Let me first say that
> I was impressed by the capabilities.
> 
> I know it is possible to verify gridded forecast fields with ASCII point
> observations. My question is whether it is possible with MET to verify *
> point* forecasts with point observations, *both* provided as ASCII files.
> 
> Thanks,
> Gerald van der Grijn
> Netherlands
> 
> 
> 
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