[Met_help] MET questions

[John Halley Gotway]

Segayle,

Good questions.

The answer to your first question is no, MET does not currently have the ability to do hurricane track verification.  However, in the DTC, we have recently been doing evaluations of hurricanes.
Primarily, we've been using a hurricane tracker and verification tools provided by the National Hurricane Center.  Those tools verify track, radius of winds, and perhaps pressure (I can't remember).
Unfortunately, I don't know if that code is publicly available and supported.

I've copied Ligia Bernardet (Ligia.Bernardet at noaa.gov) on this message.  She works for the DTC at NOAA and is the project lead for our support of WRF for Hurricanes.  She may be able to provide better
direction.

Over the next couple of years, we do have plans to add new tools to MET for the evaluation of hurricane forecasts.  But we don't have anything concrete yet.

Regarding chemistry, I'm really not sure.  You can use the Grid-Stat tool to compare two gridded fields, and the Point-Stat tool to compare a gridded forecast to point observations.  If you have point
observations related to chemistry, you may be able to get them into the right format for Point-Stat to use.  I've never seen any verification of chemistry using MET.

And lastly, regarding satellite data, in the upcoming release we're adding a new tool to handle the WWMCA cloud product.  However, most satellite data is available in HDF5 format, and we do not
currently have the capability of reading that data format.  If you were somehow able to get the cloud data in GRIB format, or a CF-compliant NetCDF format, we'd have a better shot at reading it.

Hope that helps.

John

Segayle Thompson wrote:
> Hello John,
> 
> I have a couple of questions about feasibility of using extent of the
> MET package for certain applications.
> 
> Is there anyway to verify  hurricane track  using the package?
> I am thinking that central pressure and maximum winds can be verified
> but I am not sure about the track.
> 
> Is there any capability to develop chemistry related validation?
> 
> Is it possible to use satellite data to verify some model runs?
> 
> Segayle Thompson
> 
>