Survey Gathers Community Input About Critical Fields for Evaluating the UFS and Define Priorities for DTC/NOAA’s 2021 UFS Evaluation Metrics Workshop

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), in collaboration with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Unified Forecast System’s (see ufscommunity.org) Verification and Validation Cross-Cutting Team (UFS-V&V), will be holding a three-day workshop to identify key verification and validation metrics for UFS applications. The workshop will be held remotely February 22-24, 2021. The goal of the workshop is to identify and prioritize key metrics to use for evaluating UFS research products and establish their readiness to move from one research stage to another prior to becoming operational candidates for the NCEP Production Suite.

In preparation for the Workshop, a series of pre-workshop surveys will be made available to gather community input from the diverse set of customers and stakeholders across government, academic, and private sectors.

To participate, please proceed to the 2021 DTC UFS Evaluation Metrics Workshop website to take Survey 1: Fields for up to eight modeling applications. You can also sign up for updates.

Survey 1 only attempts to prioritize fields; subsequent surveys will address specific metrics (e.g. RMSE, bias, …..) and specific levels. For this set of surveys we are trying to identify:

  • Critical fields that are needed by the user community to assess skill in each application
  • Omissions in the lists of fields that were generated at the 2018 Evaluation Metrics Workshop

This set of surveys will be open until October 30, 2020.

The Unified Forecast System (UFS) is a community-based, coupled, comprehensive Earth modeling system. The UFS numerical applications span local to global domains and predictive time scales from sub-hourly analyses to seasonal predictions. It is designed to support the Weather Enterprise and to be the source system for NOAA‘s operational numerical weather prediction applications.
Thank you in advance for your participation in this important process.
The Workshop Committee