METplus Practical Session Guide (July 2019) | MET Tool: Series-Analysis > Series-Analysis Tool: Run

Series-Analysis Tool: Run

First, we need to prepare our observations by putting 1-hourly StageII precipitation forecasts into 3-hourly buckets. We already ran PCP-Combine prior to running MTD to prepare this data.  Check that the 8 expected NetCDF files exist:

If they do, copy that directory over to the current working directory:

If they do not, go back and run the PCP-Combine commands listed here.

Note that the previous set of PCP-Combine commands could easily be run by looping through times in a shell script or through a METplus use case! The MET tools are often run using a scripting language rather than typing individual commands by hand. You'll learn more about automation using the METplus python scripts.

Next, we'll run Series-Analysis using the following command:

The statistics we requested in the configuration file will be computed separately for each grid location and accumulated over a time series of eight three-hour accumulations over a 24-hour period. Each grid point will have up to 8 matched pair values.

Note how long this command line is. Imagine how long it would be for a series of 100 files! Instead of listing all of the input files on the command line, you can list them in an ASCII file and pass that to Series-Analysis using the -fcst and -obs options.