Comparative verification in complex topography

Verification is a core activity in weather forecasting. Insights from verification are used for monitoring, for reporting, to support and motivate development of the forecasting system, and to allow users to maximize forecast value. Due to the broad range of applications for which verification provides valuable input, the range of questions one would like to answer can be very large. Static analyses and summary verification results are often insufficient to cover this broad range. To this end, we developed an interactive verification platform at MeteoSwiss that allows users to inspect verification results from a wide range of angles to find answers to their specific questions.

We present the technical setup to achieve a flexible yet performant interactive platform and two prototype applications: monitoring of direct model output from operational NWP systems and understanding of the capabilities and limitations of our pre-operational postprocessing. We present two innovations that illustrate the user-oriented approach to comparative verification adopted as part of the platform. To facilitate the comparison of a broad range of forecasts issued with varying update frequency, we rely on the concept of time of verification to collocate the most recent available forecasts at the time of day at which the forecasts are used. In addition, we offer a matrix selection to more flexibly select forecast sources and scores for comparison. Doing so, we can for example compare the mean absolute error (MAE) for deterministic forecasts to the MAE and continuous ranked probability scores of probabilistic forecasts to illustrate the benefit of using probabilistic forecasts.