Fostering International Collaboration Through a Unified Verification, Validation, and Diagnostics Framework - METplus

Verification and validation activities are critical for the success of modeling and prediction efforts at organizations around the world.  Having reproducible results via a consistent framework is equally important for model developers and users alike.  The Model Evaluation Tools (MET) was developed over a decade ago and expanded to the METplus framework with a view towards providing a consistent platform delivering reproducible results.   

The METplus system is an umbrella verification, validation and diagnostic framework for use by thousands of users from both US and international organizations.  These tools are designed to be highly flexible to allow for quick adaption to meet additional evaluation and diagnostic needs.  A suite of python wrappers have been implemented to facilitate a quick set-up and implementation of the system, and to enhance the pre-existing plotting capabilities.  Recently, several organizations within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Adminstration (NOAA), the United States Department of Defense (DOD), and international partnerships such as Unified Model (UM) Partnership led by the Met Office have adopted the tools for their use both operationally and for research purposes.  Many of these organizations are also now contributing to METplus development, leading to a more robust and dynamic framework for the entire earth system modeling community to use.

This presentation will provide an update on the current status of METplus and how it is being used in across multiple scales and applications.  It will highlight examples of METplus applied to verification and validation efforts throughout the international community to address a range of temporal (hourly forecasts to subseasonal-to-seasonal) and spatial scales (convection allowing to mesoscale, regional to global, tropical to cryosphere to space).