Near-real time verification metrics are highly important in monitoring the performance of operational space weather services (whether based on numerical models, data analysis tools or other approaches). As use of such services has grown, activity in developing appropriate verification metrics has also grown, often adopting techniques already used in Numerical Weather Prediction. These metrics are primarily used for monitoring, but the use of them to help decide whether a new model (or an upgrade to an existing model or analysis tool) should be adopted for operational use has to date been quite limited. In particular, skill scores can be a particularly effective when using the existing operational system as a benchmark. In this session we invite contributions that discuss latest results in this field, and particularly welcome results of recent intercomparison studies carried out on space weather forecasts made by different models to techniques.