Introduction

In this document I will explore how to create the first part of the evaluation system I proposed. The working title of this is the “Forecast-Hour Evaluation.” The idea here is that we are looking at the performance of the model by looking at how it performed with different start times (using the most recent 00-hr forecast as input).

## Warning in rgl.init(initValue, onlyNULL): RGL: unable to open X11 display
## Warning: 'rgl.init' failed, running with 'rgl.useNULL = TRUE'.

Read Model and Observation Data

Read WRF Data

For this evaluation system we need to look at three different output folders. Here we use the folders named, forecast_day_minus_0, forecast_day_minus_1, forecast_day_minus_2. The contents of each of these folders will be similar: wrfout files for 86 forecast hours and time-series data for different locations of interest. Here we will first read the forecast data.

Read the OBS Data

Now we will read the observation data from the ASOS stations. The script that downloads the data is in ./obs_station_day_minus_0/dl_ny_asos.py. The lines for the dates to download need to be changed before running it. Once the files are download, the lines below reads the data and adds column names.

Unit Conversion

Model and observation data do not share the same units for the same variable. For temperature, WRF is in Kelvin and ASOS is in degreesF. For winds, WRF is in m/s and ASOS is in knots. The formulas used to convert the numbers to a common system is shown here. For temperature I will use Kelvin, and m/s for wind speeds.

Combined Data Frames

Now we have one data frame for all the observations, and three (3) data frames of the WRF data (one data frame per forecast init time). The lines below provide a visual of the data frames.

##             Date.Time year mon day hour min     sec Temperature Mixing.Ratio
## 1 2020-05-13 00:00:05 2020   5  13    0   0  5.0004    285.7411      0.00392
## 2 2020-05-13 00:00:10 2020   5  13    0   0 10.0008    285.8155      0.00392
## 3 2020-05-13 00:00:15 2020   5  13    0   0 15.0012    285.8827      0.00392
## 4 2020-05-13 00:00:20 2020   5  13    0   0 20.0016    285.9429      0.00392
## 5 2020-05-13 00:00:24 2020   5  13    0   0 24.9984    285.9981      0.00392
## 6 2020-05-13 00:00:29 2020   5  13    0   0 29.9988    286.0501      0.00393
##    U_WIND   V_WIND Wind.Speed Wind.Direction Station
## 1 2.82657 -2.56698   3.818231       312.2445     JFK
## 2 2.78120 -2.50359   3.742063       311.9930     JFK
## 3 2.74043 -2.43561   3.666354       311.6297     JFK
## 4 2.70147 -2.38634   3.604519       311.4557     JFK
## 5 2.65996 -2.34432   3.545592       311.3909     JFK
## 6 2.61993 -2.29520   3.483099       311.2201     JFK
##             Date.Time year mon day hour min     sec Temperature Mixing.Ratio
## 1 2020-05-12 00:00:05 2020   5  12    0   0  5.0004    284.4861      0.00540
## 2 2020-05-12 00:00:10 2020   5  12    0   0 10.0008    284.6521      0.00540
## 3 2020-05-12 00:00:15 2020   5  12    0   0 15.0012    284.7949      0.00540
## 4 2020-05-12 00:00:20 2020   5  12    0   0 20.0016    284.9193      0.00540
## 5 2020-05-12 00:00:24 2020   5  12    0   0 24.9984    285.0302      0.00541
## 6 2020-05-12 00:00:29 2020   5  12    0   0 29.9988    285.1306      0.00541
##    U_WIND   V_WIND Wind.Speed Wind.Direction Station
## 1 6.50246 -1.04592   6.586041       279.1378     JFK
## 2 6.30699 -1.01466   6.388087       279.1394     JFK
## 3 6.14529 -0.98820   6.224237       279.1353     JFK
## 4 6.00212 -0.96661   6.079456       279.1486     JFK
## 5 5.86643 -0.94247   5.941654       279.1269     JFK
## 6 5.74277 -0.91471   5.815161       279.0501     JFK
##             Date.Time year mon day hour min     sec Temperature Mixing.Ratio
## 1 2020-05-11 00:00:05 2020   5  11    0   0  5.0004    285.7833      0.00578
## 2 2020-05-11 00:00:10 2020   5  11    0   0 10.0008    285.8739      0.00579
## 3 2020-05-11 00:00:15 2020   5  11    0   0 15.0012    285.9524      0.00579
## 4 2020-05-11 00:00:20 2020   5  11    0   0 20.0016    286.0221      0.00579
## 5 2020-05-11 00:00:24 2020   5  11    0   0 24.9984    286.0852      0.00580
## 6 2020-05-11 00:00:29 2020   5  11    0   0 29.9988    286.1436      0.00580
##    U_WIND  V_WIND Wind.Speed Wind.Direction Station
## 1 2.49281 3.95728   4.676983       212.2081     JFK
## 2 2.40258 3.73807   4.443597       212.7302     JFK
## 3 2.33753 3.58037   4.275874       213.1395     JFK
## 4 2.27977 3.43802   4.125207       213.5486     JFK
## 5 2.23034 3.33116   4.008871       213.8038     JFK
## 6 2.18926 3.24191   3.911884       214.0311     JFK
##   Station           Date.Time Temperature Relative.Humidity Wind.Direction
## 1     JFK 2020-05-12 00:00:00         NaN               NaN            310
## 2     JFK 2020-05-12 00:05:00         NaN               NaN            310
## 3     JFK 2020-05-12 00:10:00         NaN               NaN            310
## 4     JFK 2020-05-12 00:15:00         NaN               NaN            310
## 5     JFK 2020-05-12 00:20:00         NaN               NaN            310
## 6     JFK 2020-05-12 00:25:00         NaN               NaN            310
##   Wind.Speed year mon day hour min sec
## 1   6.687243 2020   5  12    0   0   0
## 2   6.687243 2020   5  12    0   5   0
## 3   7.716049 2020   5  12    0  10   0
## 4   8.230453 2020   5  12    0  15   0
## 5   7.716049 2020   5  12    0  20   0
## 6   7.716049 2020   5  12    0  25   0

Locations for Plots

Match Times for Model and Observations

Select Day of Interest

Time-matching is performed using a routine that can be found in Analysis01-Time_Matching_Problem.Rmd. The time matching will be done per variable. For the Forecast-Hour Evaluation product, we will focus on the temperature, wind speed and wind direction variables. Also, now that we have read all the TS data and ASOS data, we need to extract the day of interest, or doi for the time-series.

Note that for this product the “day of interest” will always be the UTC date of the day before.

We now have filtered data frames for the observations and model data for the day of interest.

Next, we will select only the temperature data for comparing the model and observations. This needs to be done on a per station basis. Note that we use the function drop_na() to drop rows which contain NaN or NA data. Since each variable is measured at different intervals, not all variables will have data available at every time step in the ASOS data. The functions may be too sensitive to missing data and thus we take care to remvove it here from the observations, after we have isolated a particular variable.

Temperature Time-Matching

Location: JFK

Location: LGA

Location: NYC

Wind Speed Time-Matching

Location: JFK

Location: LGA

Location: NYC

Wind Direction Time-Matching

Location: JFK

Location: LGA

Location: NYC

Forecast Hour Evaluation for JFK

For the temperature data I will use Bias, RMSE and MAE for the comparison statistics

JFK - WRF 2-m Temperature (K) Performance
Forecast.Init BIAS RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 -0.239 0.835 0.584
2 WRF D-1 0.330 1.921 1.397
3 WRF D-2 0.648 2.278 1.798
JFK - WRF 10-m Wind Speed (m/s) Performance
Forecast.Init BIAS RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 -2.249 3.016 2.631
2 WRF D-1 -1.956 2.923 2.570
3 WRF D-2 -1.945 3.373 2.837
JFK - WRF 10-m Wind Direction (degN) Performance
Forecast.Init RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 28.964 21.008
2 WRF D-1 63.385 43.015
3 WRF D-2 62.747 45.138

Forecast Hour Evaluation for LGA

LGA - WRF 2-m Temperature (K) Performance
Forecast.Init BIAS RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 -0.126 1.121 0.945
2 WRF D-1 -0.975 1.362 1.160
3 WRF D-2 -0.571 1.370 1.171
LGA - WRF 10-m Wind Speed (m/s) Performance
Forecast.Init BIAS RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 -3.000 3.400 3.029
2 WRF D-1 -2.886 3.431 3.002
3 WRF D-2 -3.214 3.720 3.266
LGA - WRF 10-m Wind Direction (degN) Performance
Forecast.Init RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 51.369 28.876
2 WRF D-1 54.151 32.486
3 WRF D-2 51.686 33.113

Forecast Hour Evaluation for NYC

NYC - WRF 2-m Temperature (K) Performance
Forecast.Init BIAS RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 0.060 0.703 0.571
2 WRF D-1 -0.659 0.944 0.759
3 WRF D-2 -0.342 1.101 0.951
NYC - WRF 10-m Wind Speed (m/s) Performance
Forecast.Init BIAS RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 -1.869 2.300 2.087
2 WRF D-1 -1.877 2.280 2.075
3 WRF D-2 -1.818 2.241 2.030
NYC - WRF 10-m Wind Direction (degN) Performance
Forecast.Init RMSE MAE
1 WRF D-0 37.460 35.308
2 WRF D-1 52.328 45.733
3 WRF D-2 38.599 34.613

uWRF and ASOS Time-Series Visualization

Temperature

## Warning: Removed 4 rows containing missing values (geom_point).

Wind Speed

Wind Direction