Feature-based(object-based)

Verification

Nathan M. HitchensNational Severe Storms Laboratory

Introduction

• Feature-based verification approaches identify “objects” within forecast and observed fields– Attributes related to the objects from each field

are compared• e.g. size, location, intensity, orientation angle, etc.

– Precipitation most common variable– Summary of approaches• Gilleland et al. 2009 and Gilleland et al. 2010

Example

1-hr precipitation (Stage II) Precipitation Objects

Approaches

• Contiguous Rain Areas (CRAs)– “The area of contiguous

observed and/or forecastrainfall enclosed within aspecified isohyet”

– CRAs are the union of forecastand observed rain entities Ebert and McBride 2000

Approaches

– Verification Statistics• Mean horizontal displacement of the forecast• Error in forecast and observed rain area• Error in mean and maximum rain rates• Error in rain volume• Pattern correlation of the corrected forecast

Approaches

• Baldwin et al. 2005– Features-based technique to classify rainfall

systems• Non-convective subclass (stratiform)• Convective subclasses (linear and cellular)

– First identify objects similar to Ebert and McBride 2000

Approaches

– Use manual expert classification of system type on “training” dataset

– Apply cluster analysisto training dataset• Gamma-scale parameter

and object eccentricityfound to have mostdetermining power

Baldwin et al. 2005

Approaches

• Method for Object-based Diagnostic Analysis (MODE)– Smoothing of fields

to filter out small-scale variations

Davis et al. 2006

Approaches– Smoothed fields are

thresholded to allow object boundaries to be detected

– Identified objects may also be “associated” into simple shapes for better evaluation of some attributes (aspect ratio, angle, etc)

Davis et al. 2006

Approaches

– Observed and forecasted objects can be “matched” based on the distance between two objects (relative to their size)

– Object attributes are compared (either with or without matching)

My Research

• Used Baldwin’s approach to identify objects– 6.0 mm threshold applied to 1-hr Stage II

precipitation

• Identified threshold for “extreme” as 99th percentile value of maximum precip in objects

• Used WRF to simulate selected events

28 August 1998ST2

NARR

60-km

90-km

120-km

150-km

180-km

R1

Methods

• BOOIA applied to ST2 product and precipitation from each simulation– Simulated objects compared to observed using Euclidean

distance approach– Object dissimilarity score formula:

• where s is areal size, me is mean precipitation value, ma is maximum precipitation value, x is the x-direction coordinate, y is the y-coordinate value, and the subscripts O and F represent observed and forecast objects

• Coefficients A through E are for weighting purposes

Methods

– Each attribute is scaled based on the formula:

• where z is the scaled attribute, z0 is the non-scaled attribute, z10 is the attribute’s 10th percentile value, and z90 is the attribute’s 90th percentile value

28 August 1998

• BOOIA attributes for observed and forecast objects

Questions?