Background

The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) Commission for Basic Systems (CBS-2016) recommended to establish a Lead Centre for Wave Forecast Verification (LC-WFV) and to designate ECMWF as this Lead Centre.

Objective

The main objective of this Lead Centre is to coordinate wave forecast verification by

• Providing the facility for Joint Technical Commission for Oceanography and Marine Meteorology (JCOMM) participating Centres producing global or ocean basin scale wave forecasts to automatically deposit their gridded forecast fields, and have access to the verification statistics computed for these fields
• Maintaining an archive of the verification statistics to allow the generation and display of trends in performance
• Monitoring the received forecast fields and consult with the relevant JCOMM participating Centre if data are missing or suspect
• Collecting annually from the participating centres information on any changes to their wave forecast systems
• Providing access to the data sets used to perform the standard verification, including lists of observations and keep this up to date according to JCOMM recommendations
• Providing on its website:

1. 1. Up-to-date graphical displays of verification results from JCOMM participating Centres based on evaluation of the received forecast fields
   2. Relevant documentation including access to the standard procedures required to perform the verification, and links to the websites of JCOMM participating Centres
   3. Contact details to encourage feedback from JCOMM participating Centres on the usefulness of the verification information

Participating Centres

Data format

GRIB data specification

Verification plots