Scripting

By now you should be beginning to feel comfortable running the MET tools on the command line, and you're ready to begin applying it to your own datasets. Once you get to the point where you're confident that MET is producing the right statistics with the settings you like, it would be a good time to start scripting the calls to MET tools. Many users will find it convenient to set up scripts to run MET on large sets of data or run it in near real-time mode based on the availability of your forecast and observation datasets. It may be useful to set up such a script and call it as a cron job to run one or more times per day.

The MET Users Guide provides some basic examples of scripting calls to MET using the Bourne shell. In addition, a sample script for processing the output of MODE using the awk Unix utility is given in the section on scripting.