A New Spatial Alignment Summary Measure For High-Resolution Gridded Forecast Verification

Spatial forecast verification has exploded into an increasingly complicated set of tools for either automatically assessing forecast performance or providing diagnostic plots and other information.  A set of tools that breaks that mold by providing simple, easy-to-understand summary measures has also gained some traction in recent years, and are now included, for example, in the MET software.  No single summary will provide all the information needed and each will have its pros and cons.  Recent work has demonstrated some common pitfalls with each of them.  Predicated off of this work, a new summary measure is proposed that does not suffer from any of these flaws, while providing useful information about forecast performance.