Why use CSET?

When evaluating weather and climate models we are trying to understand the characteristics of our model configurations, the physical processes that lead to biases, and how they compares to other models (physical and machine learned), model configurations and observations. This is an iterative process, and each step of evaluation unveils more questions that need investigations. Evaluation often follows an individual approach by researchers spending significant resource on scientific and technical development.

CSET aids in this by providing a flexible way to interrogate model data, using diagnostics that can be quickly created by the combination of operators in Run an Operator Recipe. Common operations such as reading, writing, and regridding are provided to reduce duplication of effort.

CSET provides a legacy for user-developed evaluation methods and diagnostics to be shared and documented, with well-defined working practices and review processes to ensure best practice for evaluation and verification linked to convective- and turbulence-scale model configurations. Therefore, it provides many benefits in reproducibility, portability, accessibility, maintainability, and quality assurance. By contributing newly developed diagnostics to CSET you ensure their legacy, ensure their quality assurance and benefit to the entire modelling community. Furthermore, any operators that the community finds especially useful will be contributed back to METplus, so they can serve an even wider community.