Measuring Displacement Errors with Complex Wavelets

Abstract

When highly resolved precipitation forecasts are verified against observations, displacement errors tend to overshadow all other aspects of forecast quality. The appropriate treatment and explicit measurement of such errors remains a challenging task. This study explores a new verification technique that uses the phase of complex wavelet coefficients to quantify spatially varying displacements. Idealized and realistic test cases from the MesoVICT project demon-strate that our approach yields helpful results in a variety of situations where popular alternatives may struggle. Potential benefits of very high spatial resolutions can be identified even when the observational dataset is coarsely resolved itself. The new score can furthermore be applied not only to precipitation but also variables such as wind speed and potential temperature, thereby overcoming a limitation of many established location scores.