[Met_help] Re: Questions about point_stat

[John Halley Gotway]

Ed,

You're right, Point-Stat does expect the message type field to be filled.  I believe that you could make up your own - although I've never done exactly what you're doing before, so I'm not positive.
I believe that NCEP generally uses "MC_PCP" as a precipitation message type.  So you could use that convention if you like.

As for the model name, it's included in the configuration file for exactly the reason your asking about.  When verifying output from multiple models, you should choose a descriptive "model" name that
will allow you differentiate the verification results for each model.  Suppose for example that you're verifying WRF runs with two different sets of physics options.  You might choose models names of
"WRF_PH1" and "WRF_PH2".  All the MET tools do with the model name is copy it to the output data.  So now you'll be able to distinguish the results of the two models based on the model name in the
output.  Please note though that since the model names are different, you'd need to use two different configuration files - one for each model.

Thanks for the heads up about the typos.  We'll fix them for the next release.

Thanks,
John

Ed Tollerud wrote:
> John,
> 
> I had a couple of questions about using point_stat. I am setting up to
> introduce my own file of point precipitation obs as verification data
> using ascii2nc. In that first step (ascii2nc), I interpreted the
> description of the first column (Message_type) as indicating that I
> could use an empty bracket [ ] in this case. In the description of the
> configuration file for point_stat I see that a message_type is needed.
> Should I have 'invented' a message_type for the input to ascii2nc that
> would carryover to point_stat? Also, can the model name (eg., "wrf") be
> anything useful that I define (we have several previously defined
> 'flavors' of WRF that we want to verify and compare)?
> 
> At the risk of sounding petty, I did find two typos that wouldn't
> confuse anyone but which you might want to change. In the list of
> argument descriptions for the config file for point_stat, one argument
> is missing (temp_dir). In the description of ascii2nc in Section 3.6.1,
> your title for Required Arguments includes pb2nc instead of ascii2nc.
> 
> Ed
>