MET Version 8.1

What's New?

• Major Enhancements: Fortify compliance, percentile thresholds, land/sea mask and topography in Point-Stat, the derive option in PCP-Combine, and Gaussian interpolation
• New Tools: No new tools

Changes to Output Formats:

• Added header columns, "FCST_UNITS" and "OBS_UNITS", to indicate the units of the data processed to the STAT, MODE, and MTD ASCII output files.
• Added "DX" and "DY" columns to the GRAD line type to indicate the gradient step sizes which are now configurable for Grid-Stat.
• Added percentile intensity columns to the MTD 2D output files.

Enhancements to Existing Tools:

• Fixed bugs related to MET's Python interface, Fourier decomposition in Grid-Stat, HiRA in Point-Stat, and memory management in MODE.
• Fortify is a static code analyzer tool which identifies potential security vulnerabilities.  Scanned the MET code base with Fortify and restructured it to address all high priority Fortify issues.
• Common Libraries
  • Added support for defining thresholds as percentiles of data (see the user's guide for details and examples).
  • Added support for the Gaussian interpolation and regridding method, including the sigma option to define the shape.
  • Updated the embedded python logic so that failures result in a warning instead of an error.
  • Enhanced the NetCDF library to request data using a timestring instead of requiring an explicit index for the time dimension.
  • Enhanced the NetCDF library to handle a wider variety of data types.
  • Added support for specifying the "file_type" option when parsing the "poly" configuration setting.
  • Added GRIB2 configuration filtering options, "GRIB2_ipdtmpl_index" and "GRIB2_ipdtmpl_val", to explicitly request product description template values.
  • Fixed GRIB2 support for Polar Stereographic and Lambert Conformal grids in the southern hemisphere.
• PCP-Combine
  • Added the "-derive" functionality to compute the sum, min, max, range, mean, standard deviation, or valid data count of data from a series of input files.
  • Added the "-vld_thresh" command line option to specify the required ratio of valid data at each grid point to compute an output value.
• Regrid-Data-Plane
  • Calculated GOES-16/17 pixel locations from metadata of the input files so that it can process multiple scenes of GOES-16/17 data.
• ASCII2NC
  • Added support to the "-format" command line option to handle "aeronetv2" and "aeronetv3".
• MADIS2NC
  • Added configuration file to control the computation of time summaries.
• Point-Stat
  • Added "land_mask" and "topo_mask" config file entries to define land/sea mask and model topography information which control how matched pairs are computed when verifying at the surface.
  • Added new interpolation method named "GEOG_MATCH" to search the interpolation area for the closest grid point where the land/sea mask and topography criteria are satisfied.
• Grid-Stat
  • Added "gradient" config file entry to define the size of the gradients to be computed in both the x ("dx") and y ("dy") directions.
• MTD
  • Added percentile intensity columns to the MTD 2D output files: INTENSITY_10, INTENSITY_25, INTENSITY_50, INTENSITY_75, INTENSITY_90
  • Corrected timestamps in the header columns.
• Stat-Analysis
  • When using the "-by" job command option, enable "-set_hdr" to reference the current values of the "-by" columns.  For example, the following job sets the output VX_MASK column to each observation station name found:
    -job aggregate_stat -line_type MPR -out_line_type CNT -by OBS_SID -set_hdr VX_MASK OBS_SID -out_stat mpr_to_cnt_by_sid.stat