What's New?

Please refer to the MET User's Guide for a more detailed description of these new additions:

• Initial release of the Ensemble-Stat tool. This tool will read an arbitrary number of deterministic forecast files and derive ensemble forecasts and statistics. Ensemble mean, spread, and probability are among the many fields that can be derived by this tool. Additionally, if corresponding observations are included, this tool will produce rank histograms, probability integral transform (PIT) values, and the continuous ranked probability score (CRPS).
• Addition of a tools subdirectory for ancillary tools that may not be of general interest. These tools are not compiled unless the compilation flag is enabled in the top-level Makefile.
• In the tools subdirectory, initial release of the wwmca_regrid and wwmca_plot tools for regridding and plotting the World Wide Merged Cloud Analysis (WWMCA) product from the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA).
• In the tools subdirectory, initial release of plot_point_obs tool for plotting the locations of point observations in the MET NetCDF point observation file format.
• Enhance MET to support the NetCDF output of the WRF-ARW pinterp tool. When reading gridded NetCDF data into the MET tools, users will now have to explicitly specify in the configuraiton file the names and dimensions of the NetCDF variables to be read.

Library Code

• Enhance to read the gridded NetCDF output of the WRF-ARW pinterp tool.
• Enhance to read the gridded NetCDF output of the MET Ensemble-Stat tool.
• Enhance the NetCDF output of the MET tools to include global attributes for the MET version and MET tool used to create it.
• Enhance the gridded NetCDF output of the MET tools to include variables specifying the latitude and longitude of each grid point so the data can be displayed using the Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) tool from UCAR-Unidata.
• Enhance the gridded NetCDF output of the MET tools to include a standard set of variable attributes containing timing information.
• Enhance the parsing of the gridded NetCDF data files to be backwards compatible with METv2.0 so that METv3.0 can read the NetCDF output of the PCP-Combine tool from METv2.0.

ASCII2NC and PB2NC Tools

• Enhance how accumulation intervals are stored in the NetCDF point observation files. Store them as seconds rather than hours to allow for sub-hourly accumulation intervals.

PB2NC Tool

• Modify FORTRAN code to remove compiler warnings.
• Modify logic of the "-dump" command line option to only do an ASCII dump for those message types actually requested in the configuration file.

Gen-Poly-Mask Tool

• No changes.

PCP-Combine Tool

• Enhance the error checking of command line arguments.
• Enhance logic for the "-add" command to allow for an arbitrary number (1 or more) of input files to be added together.
• Enhance to allow for multiple entries for the "-pcp_dir" command line argument to specify multiple search directories.
• Enhance to allow for off-hour accumulation intervals by specifying them in HH[MMSS] format. Output NetCDF variables are named in APCP_HH or APCP_HHMMSS format.
• Enhance to allow for off-hour data by specifying timestrings in YYYYMMDD[_HH[MMSS]] format.
• Modify how the "level" NetCDF variable attribute is written to be consistent with how the level information is written by the other MET tools.

Point-Stat, Grid-Stat, Wavelet-Stat, and MODE Tools

• Add "-fcst_lead", "-fcst_valid", "-obs_lead", and "-obs_valid" command line options to explicitly specify which GRIB records to use. These are necessary when reading a GRIB file containing multiple output times.
• Delete trailing spaces from the ASCII output files generated by these STAT tools, thus greatly reducing the file size of the output STAT files.
• Enhance to write out error messages using human-readable time strings rather than unixtime.
• Enhance to more closely check the equality of the input forecast and observation grids. Ensure that they are identical, rather than just having the same dimensions.

Point-Stat and Grid-Stat Tools

• Enhance to parse NCEP's probability information from the GRIB Product Description Section, specifically for the Short-Range Ensemble Forecast (SREF) data.
• In the probabilistic contingency table statistics (PSTD) line type, add the base rate as an output column (BASER).
• In PSTD line type, move the "N_THRESH" output column after "TOTAL" to be consistent with the other probabilistic line types.
• For the output probabilistic lines (PCT, PSTD, PJC, and PRC) in the "FCST_THRESH" output column, replace NA with a list of the actual probability thresholds used.
• Add support for the multi-category contingency table counts and statistics, MCTC and MCTS output lines, respectively. Multi-category contingency tables are computed whenever the output flags for them is turned on and the user has specified multiple thresholds to be used.
• Enhance to only require that users specify thresholds in the configuration file when they have selected output line types that actually require them.

Point-Stat Tool

• Enhance to allow for the verification of ranges of vertical levels (e.g. TMP/Z30-60), rather than just ranges of pressure levels.
• If one of the point observation files passed to Point-Stat doesn't exist, print a warning message rather than erroring out.
• Rename command line option from "-ncfile" to "-point_obs" to be consistent with the Ensemble-Stat options.
• Rename command line options from "-valid_beg" and "-valid_end" to "-obs_valid_beg" and "-obs_valid_end". Note that previous options do still work.
• Add the station name as an output column (OBS_SID) in the matched pair (MPR) output line type.
• Explicitly state the observation valid time in the "OBS_VALID_BEG" and "OBS_VALID_END" columns in the matched pair (MPR) output line type.
• Add detailed logging information when verbosity is set to 3 or higher. For each verification task, dump out counts of reason codes listing why observations were not used.
• Enhace the error checking to error out when the user has specified a gridded NetCDF forecast file but has not specified the verifying GRIB observations (obs_field) to be used in the configuration file.

Grid-Stat Tool

• Add the "-interp_flag" configuration option to specify which fields should be smoothed.
• Enhance the algorithm for computing fractional coverage for neighborhood verification methods, making the code run substantially faster for large neighborhood sizes.

Wavelet-Stat Tool

• Enhance to allow the forecast and observation fields to be specified separately in the configuration file.

Stat-Analysis Tool

• Add the "-column_eq" job command option for filtering STAT data.
• Add the "-column_str" job command option to do string comparisons when filtering STAT data. This was added to filter on the station names listed in the "OBS_SID" column. Users may specify multiple values by providing a comma-separated list.
• Enhance to parse and aggregate the RHIST and ORANK output lines from the Ensemble-Stat tool.
• Enhance to parse and aggregate the MCTC and MCTS output lines from the Point-Stat and Grid-Stat tools.
• Add "-tmp_dir" command line argument and fix bug in how the temporary directory is set.
• Add the "-vif_flag" job command option to enable the computation of the variance inflation factor. Enabling the VIF causes the normal confidence intervals in the output statistics to be adjusted to account for lag 1 autocorrelation when accumulating statistics through time.
• Fix bug to enable Stat-Analysis to accumulate matched pair lines (MPR) and compute the MCTC or MCTS output line types.
• Fix bug so that Stat-Analysis can parse strings like "PROB(TMP<273)" in the "FCST_VAR" and "OBS_VAR" columns when reading MPR lines.

MODE Tool

• Shortened the output file naming convention by removing the fcst/obs variable/level information. Suggest using the "output_prefix" configuration option to customize output file names.

MODE-Analysis Tool

• No changes.