2018 DTC Community Unified Forecast System Test Plan and Metrics Workshop

Community workshop on Numerical Weather Prediction test plan and metrics for model validation and verification

The workshop, which took place at the NCWCP in College Park, MD, was held for two and a half days prior to the NGGPS Strategic Implementation Planning (SIP) meeting at the same location. The major goal of this workshop was to develop 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 NWP community for testing and validating new developments for the UFS models and components, and for verifying the UFS for both historical and real-time forecasts using observations and analyses, through standardized hierarchical testing. While metrics for all spatial and temporal scales for NWP models was open for discussion at the workshop, emerging topics such as the verification of Convective Allowing Models, coupled earth system models, and ensemble systems were emphasized.

The full two days of the workshop (July 30th - July 31st, 2018) consisted of participant presentations, short discussion periods, and editing plan documents in various topic-based breakout sessions.  A wrap-up session was held on the final morning (August 1st). NGGPS Strategic Implementation Planning (SIP) meeting attendees were encouraged to participate in the Test Plan and Metrics wrap-up session prior to their meeting starting the afternoon of August 1st.