The METexpress Visualization Suite

The NOAA Global Systems Laboratory (GSL) and the Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) have collaboratively developed METexpress, a lightweight, quick-start visualization suite used to retrieve and view data from the advanced Model Evaluation Tools (METplus). METplus is a unified verification system for community model development efforts, and marks a major advancement of the Unified Forecast System Research-to-Operations (UFS-R2O) project. Community verification tools have been crucial in these community development projects, as they give all participants a common framework for evidence-based decision-making when transitioning models to operations.

METexpress comprises eight individual apps, each designed to verify a particular meteorological facet, and features an intuitive interface with which users can quickly produce interactive graphs of common plot types.

METexpress includes applications that display performance metrics for upper air fields, anomaly correlation, surface fields, air quality fields, precipitation fields, tropical and extratropical cyclones, as well as ensembles and object-based verification.

METexpress has transitioned to operations within the NWS Environmental Modeling Center (https://metexpress.nws.noaa.gov). METexpress, like the rest of METplus, is open source, with the goal that it continues to expand amongst the UFS-R2O community and to other public- and private-sector entities, aiding the development of new, next-generation models.For more information about METexpress, please visit https://dtcenter.org/community-code/metexpress or email mats.gsl@noaa.gov.

The METexpress user interface