At the WMO Commission for Basic Systems (CBS) ET-OWFPS Meeting on 22-24 October 2014 in Geneva, a draft document on standardized surface verification of deterministic NWP products was created. The document specifies the content of the future exchange of surface scores between global centres. The format for the exchange has not been defined yet. Below, two versions of a simple ascii format are proposed:
(a) Vertical-bar (VBar) delimited format (this is slightly simpler to implement but is less flexible with regard to possible future extensions)
(b) Record format (slightly more complicated but also more flexible, with the additional advantage that it is the same as the one proposed for upper-air scores)
Data format
(a) VBar-delimited format
Data file consists of score values and corresponding metadata in an ASCII format.
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centre | model_id | yyyymm | time | forecast_step | station_id | latitude | longitude | station_elevation | model_orography_elevation | parameter | score | event | sample_size | score_mean_value |
(b) Record format
Data file consists of score values and corresponding metadata in an ASCII format.
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