The purpose of this technical note is to describe and demonstrate the capabilities of a processor (VERIFY) developed to verify objectively forecasts generated by the PSU/NCAR Mesoscale Model (MM4). VERIFY has the ability to examine model performance through verification by means of three distinctly different functions: comparison against rawinsonde station data, comparison against gridded analyses, and comparison against gridded observed precipitation. Designed to execute within the NCAR Scientific Computing Division environment on the CRAY supercomputers, VERIFY uses data sets that reside on the mass storage system. In this note the capabilities of this processor are outlined, the philosophy and strategy behind the code structure is discussed, a users' guide is given, and the limitations of the processor are presented. This note does not provide a comprehensive description of the processor code, nor of the data sets upon which it operates. VERIFY was developed primarily to analyze the MM4 performance. Due to the flexibility of its design, however, the results from other modelsboth regional and global-can easily be incorporated.
