METplus Practical Session Guide (Version 5.0) | Session 8: METplus Analysis Tools > METviewer

METviewer: General

METviewer Overview

METviewer is a database and display system for storing and plotting data from the MET .stat and MODE _obj.txt files. It is used heavily within the DTC and by NOAA-GSD and NOAA-EMC. While its distribution is limited, it is available to the community through a Docker container. For more information, please see:

Here, we will use the publicly available version of METviewer running at NCAR to demonstrate the METviewer webapp.

METviewer reads MET verification statistics from a database and creates plots using the R statistical package. The tool includes a web application that can be accessed from a web browser to create a single plot. The specification for each plot is built using a series of controls and then serialized into XML. For each plot, METviewer generates a SQL query, an R script to create the plot, a flat file containing the data that will be plotted and the plot itself.

METviewer Web Application

The following example can be run using the METviewer instance located at the link below. It is recommended to move the new tab into a new browser window, so that you can view both the example instructions and the METviewer web application side-by-side.

The following pages have instructions for generating two different types of plots:

  • A threshold series plot of Accuracy (ACC) and Critical Success Index (CSI)
  • A forecast lead time box plot series of MODE object area distributions

Please be sure to follow these instructions in order.