An evidence-based evaluation of all components of the UFS is needed to make effective decisions guiding the development of the UFS and to ensure that the new systems are better than those being replaced. The Verification and Validation Working Group is looking at ways to construct optimal verification methods and tools to evaluate the performance of the UFS at both global and meso scales and consider the spectrum of user needs including applications in aviation, severe storms, space weather, tropical cyclones, and precipitation forecasting. Ultimately, it is intended that this system will unify verification across the user community and create common metrics for multiple applications with the intent to provide consistent verification approaches. In this case, verification relates to the weather prediction context of using observations to assess skill.

Under the auspices of the Next Generation Global Predictions System (NGGPS) program, a unification of the verification system is based on the community Model Evaluation Tools (MET), originally developed at NCAR/Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) through the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC). It has been expanded to include a database and display system, called METviewer, and python scripts for low-level workflows to demonstrate use-cases (examples), and is now called METplus. METplus is a flexible suite of verification tools developed by the community led by NCAR/RAL, NOAA/ESRL and NOAA/EMC, and supported to the community through the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC).