[Met_help] Wind Speed Verification

[Brent L Shaw]

John,

OK.  Originally, my program that creates the ASCII files we process through ASCII2NC had wind direction and speed, but then U and V were not getting verified.  I think it may be easy for me to add those back in.  I should probably go ahead and add wind speed and direction to the GRIB files as well.  I am sure we will need those for somebody sometime anyway!

Brent

-----Original Message-----
From: John Halley Gotway [mailto:johnhg at rap.ucar.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, July 09, 2009 11:14 AM
To: Brent L Shaw
Cc: Phillip Spencer; met_help
Subject: Re: Wind Speed Verification

Brent,

I took a look at the data you sent and this time the news isn't as good.

Point-Stat is deriving a wind speed forecast field from the U and V components.  However, it's not doing so for the point observations.  It's in the PB2NC tool that we have the ability to derive wind
speed observations from U and V.  But since you're using ASCII2NC, the derivation of wind speed isn't currently available.

It occurs to me that I may be able to add a few lines of code to add the derivation of wind speed to ASCII2NC.  Let me give it a shot, and I'll get back to you.  The other option would be for you to
do it when formatting the ASCII obs as input for ASCII2NC.

Thanks,
John


Brent L Shaw wrote:
> Hi John,
> 
> I work with Phillip Spencer, and we were trying your suggestion this morning on adding WIND to the configuration file.  When I ran point_stat, it still did not verify the wind speed.  Even though it showed 1800+ pairs for UGRD and VGRD, it showed verifying with 0 pairs when it tried to do WIND.  In our case, we are doing WIND/Z010.  Our GRIB file has grid-relative U and V components, and our observation file has true U and V components.  Note that we do not use WRFPost.  If all else fails, I can create wind direction and speed in our post-processing, but I would prefer not to have to do that if I don't need to.
> 
> I have attached the GRIB file, the observation file, and the configuration file used for trying to run point_stat.   Your help is appreciated!
> 
> On a different note, I mentioned these two suggestions to Barb at the WRF Users' Conference a couple of weeks ago, and she said I should pass them along to you:
> 
> 
>  1.  It would be helpful if the matched pair lines could also include the station ID instead of just the lat/lon.
>  2.  We would like to use MySQL to store various stats so we can more easily dynamically query for the necessary metrics.  Barb mentioned that such a capability is being worked on, so I would like to pass along our advocacy for that.
> 
> Best regards,
> 
> Brent
> 
> _____________________________
> Brent L. Shaw
> V.P., Director of NWP Laboratory
> Weather Decision Technologies, Inc.
> Office:    (405) 579-7675 x246
> Mobile:   (405) 397-9950
> e-mail:    bshaw at wdtinc.com
> 
>