The 2018 DTC Community Unified Forecast System Test Plan and Metrics Workshop was held at NOAA’s National Center for Weather and Climate Prediction (NCEP) on July 30 - August 1, 2018. The major goal of this workshop was to work towards a community test plan with common validation and verification metrics for the emerging Unified Forecast System (UFS). The plan will serve as a guide for the Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) community for testing and evaluating new developments for the UFS models and components by comparison of both historical and real-time forecasts using observations and analyses, through standardized hierarchical testing.
The workshop organization was led by the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), and the organizing committee was representative of various aspects of the NWP verification and validation (V&V) enterprise, including voices from those working on research, development, transitions, and operations. The membership of the organizing committee was:
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Curtis Alexander - NOAA/Earth Systems Research Laboratory Global Systems Division (GSD)
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Ligia Bernardet - CU/Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Studies (CIRES) at NOAA/GSD and DTC
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Tara Jensen - National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and DTC
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Jim Kinter - George Mason University/Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA)
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Sherrie Morris (NOAA Office of Science and Technology Integration (OSTI)
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Jason Levit (NOAA/NCEP/Environmental Modeling Center (EMC)
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Ryan Torn (State University of New York at Albany)
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Ivanka Stajner (NOAA OSTI on detail to NOAA/NCEP/EMC)
The workshop was attended by approximately 100 participants, cross-cutting through various sectors of the V&V community, including international (Taiwan Central Weather Bureau and European Center for Medium-range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF), universities, NASA, NOAA National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS), research laboratories, Office of the Federal Coordinator for Meteorological Services and Supporting Research, National Weather Service, testbeds, Navy, U.S. Air Force, and the private sector.
The workshop had a mix of presentations, discussion periods, and working sessions in which participants contributed to the three topic-based breakout sessions: test plans, metrics, and hierarchical testing. Metrics for all spatial and temporal scales for numerical weather prediction models and emerging topics such as the verification of convective allowing models, coupled earth system models, and ensemble systems were discussed.
The last activity in the workshop was a summary of the working sessions’ discussions by their leads, which was presented to workshop participants and members of the UFS Strategic Implementation Plan (SIP) meeting. A report on the progress made during the workshop will be available in the next few months.
A link to the workshop page is here: 2018 DTC Community Unified Forecast SystemTest Plans and Metrics Workshop
