A Gaussian mixture model approach to forecast verification

Abstract

Verification methods for high-resolution forecasts have been based either on filtering or on objects created by thresholding the images. The filtering methods do not easily permit the use of deformation while identifying objects based on thresholds can be problematic. In this paper, a new approach is introduced in which the observed and forecast fields are broken down into a mixture of Gaussians, and the parameters of the Gaussian mixture model fit are examined to identify translation, rotation, and scaling errors. The advantages of this method are discussed in terms of the traditional filtering or object-based methods and the resulting scores are interpreted on a standard verification dataset. © 2010 American Meteorological Society.