[Met_help] Mesonet data

[John Halley Gotway]

Allan,

Here's a couple of comments for you...

(1) First, how do we know what's actually in the PREPBUFR files you're using?  When you run PB2NC on the PREPBUFR files, one of the command line options is "-dump".  That will dump the contents of
PREPBUFR files to ASCII files in the directory you specify.  Unfortunately, this is exceedingly slow, but you could do it for a sample file just to see what's in there.  I don't know of a nice tool
for interacting with PREPBUFR files and viewing their contents.  It would be nice if something like that existed.

I grabbed a GDAS PREPBUFR file and ran it through PB2NC using the "-dump" option.  Looking in the output, I see that the MSONET ASCII file is empty.  So there don't appear to be any MSONET
observations in those GDAS files.  It's possible that the MSONET observations are "restricted".  The files NCEP posts for public use end in ".nr", meaning they are "not restricted".  The restricted
versions of those files are only available within NCEP.

(2) In MET, we've inherited the way we do matching at the surface from the NCEP verification tools we began with.  Their approach was very simple - it's all based on the message type being verified.
Observations with message types of "ADPSFC" or "SFCSHP" are, by definition, considered to be at the surface.  In MET, we consider variables at the surface, 2-meter temperature, and 10-meter winds to
be surface variables.  So when verifying against different message types, Point-Stat will only match up ADPSFC or SFCSHP observations to those variables.  For example, if you compare 2-meter temp to
observations of type ADPUPA, you'll never get any matched pairs.

We'll likely need to refine that logic to handle MSONET observations.  It'd be pretty easy to tweak the code to allow those types of comparisons.  Let me know if you are able to acquire MSONET
observations and run into this problem.

Hope that helps,
John

Allan Huffman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am currently verifying surface parameters from our company's high resolution regional WRF model using the MET tool and comparing our forecast output to the NCEP GDAS prepbufr file. This works well, but for now, I am only using the ADPSFC option, so I think most of what is being compared are the ASOS stations.
> 
> I was wondering if mesonet data is included in the prepbufr file generated by NCEP, and if show how to use point-stat to calculate statistics from mesonet data.
> 
> I have tried using TMP/Z2, TMP/Z0, and TMP/L0 but when I run point-stat it will not give me any matched pairs. I also tried re-running PB2NC setting quality_mark_thresh to 9, just to make sure the mesonet data was not being overlooked because of percieved quality issues. And then I re-ran point-stat and got the same output. 
> 
> I am setting the message_type in point_stat to MSONET, and as I mentioned above fcst_field and obs_filed to TMP/Z2, TMP/L2, TMP/ZO and several combinations of the two. And yet I still cannot get any matched pairs.
> 
> The tools works fine for the ADPSFC matching, but not for MSONET matching. I would like to be able to use mesonet data in the prepbufr file to verify against, if it is possible.
> 
> Thanks for any help.
> 
> Allan Huffman
> Airdat LLC 
> 
> 
>       
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