METplus Practical Session Guide (Version 5.0) | Session 3: Analysis Tools > MET Tool: Series-Analysis

Series-Analysis Tool: General

Series-Analysis Functionality

The Series-Analysis Tool accumulates statistics separately for each horizontal grid location over a series. Usually, the series is defined as a time series, however any type of series is possible, including a series of vertical levels. This differs from the Grid-Stat tool in that Grid-Stat computes statistics aggregated over a spatial masking region at a single point in time. The Series-Analysis Tool computes statistics for each individual grid point and can be used to quantify how the model performance varies over the domain.

Series-Analysis Usage

View the usage statement for Series-Analysis by simply typing the following:

series_analysis
Usage: series_analysis  
  -fcst file_1 ... file_n Gridded forecast files or ASCII file containing a list of file names.
  -obs file_1 ... file_n Gridded observation files or ASCII file containing a list of file names.
  [-both file_1 ... file_n] Sets the -fcst and -obs options to the same list of files
(e.g. the NetCDF matched pairs files from Grid-Stat).
  [-paired] Indicates that the -fcst and -obs file lists are already matched up
(i.e. the n-th forecast file matches the n-th observation file).
  -out file NetCDF output file name for the computed statistics.
  -config file SeriesAnalysisConfig file containing the desired configuration settings.
  [-log file] Outputs log messages to the specified file
  [-v level] Level of logging (optional).
  [-compress level] NetCDF compression level (optional).

At a minimum, the -fcst-obs (or -both), -out, and -config settings must be passed in on the command line. All forecast and observation fields must be interpolated to a common grid prior to running Series-Analysis.