Data Formats

Forecast Data

MET is designed to verify gridded forecast products. The gridded forecast data MET reads generally in either GRIB1 format, GRIB2 format, CF-Compliant NetCDF, or as the NetCDF output of the WRF-ARW wrf_interp tool. Pre-processing tools, such as MODIS-Regrid and WWMCA-Regrid, are provide to reformat select binary data into a NetCDF format for use in MET. If rebinning of accumulation intervals is required, the PCP-Combine tool can convert the input gridded data into a NetCDF format that can be used in the statistical verification tools (Point-Stat, Grid-Stat, Wavelet-Stat, Ensemble-Stat, MODE, and Series-Analysis).

Users may choose to reformat their gridded data from some other format to the intermediate NetCDF format used by the PCP-Combine tool for use with MET. Support for CF-Compliant NetCDF files was added in METv5.0. Please send email to met_help@ucar.edu if you have trouble with your CF-Compliant files.

Point Observations

Point observations used in MET may either be in PrepBufr format (converted using PB2NC), ASCII format (converted using ASCII2NC), or NetCDF MADIS format (converted using MADIS2NC). The NetCDF output of PB2NC, ASCII2NC, and MADIS2NC is used as input to the Point-Stat and Ensemble-Stat tools.

Gridded Analyses

Gridded analyses can be used for model evaluation in MET. The same data formats listed above for forecast data are supported here.