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? WGFVR/HIWeather|Winners of the 2nd International Verification Challenge for the Best New Verification Metric Making Use of Non-Traditional Observations

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World Weather Research Programme (WWRP)

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We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2nd International Verification Challenge for the Best New Verification Metric Making Use of Non-Traditional Observations. 

The winning team is Faith Mitheu, Elena Tarnavsky, Andrea Ficchi from the University of Reading in the UK with their entry “Semi-quantitative information on flood impact for verification of flood events: Case study of Uganda”. They used information on flood impacts and damage reports collated from four different impact and disaster databases to augment data from sparse river gauges to assess the skill and reliability of the GloFAS (Global Flood Awareness System) point and gridded flood forecasts from the Copernicus Emergency Management Service. A member of this team will be invited to attend and present a keynote talk on their approach at the next International Verification Methods Workshop. 

In second place are Anna-Sophie Fortin from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Greg Smith from McGill University with “Verification of eddy-properties in operational oceanographic analysis systems”. They used an object matching algorithm to evaluate predictions of the location and properties of ocean eddies in two different ocean prediction systems, using altimetry observations of sea surface height from the Archiving, Validation and Interpretation of Satellite Oceanographic (AVISO) global daily gridded product. 

In third place are José Roberto M. Garcia, Paulo Nobre, Rafael Duarte Coelho dos Santos, and Renato Galante from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in Brazil using “Cloud coverage estimation using webcams". They tested several approaches for automatically estimating cloud cover from ordinary static webcams situated around the world and providing their data online. These data could then be used to evaluate forecasts of cloud cover.

We congratulate all of the entrants on their innovative approaches and hope that non-traditional observations will become more widely used in the community to evaluate forecasts and give users greater confidence to use the forecasts in their decision making. 

The 2nd Verification Challenge was run by the WWRP Joint Working Group on Forecast Verification Research and the High Impact Weather project.