Spatial verification approaches as a tool to evaluate the performance of high resolution precipitation forecasts

The spatial resolution of Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models has increased significantly in recent years. While high-resolution models are able to produce more detailed precipitation structures, their true benefit lies in more realistic statistics rather than the information provided for a specific grid point. Unfortunately, NWP model verification using traditional grid-point-by-grid-point methods has not managed to keep pace due to the limited amount of point observations available in comparable resolution. Spatial verification methods represent a possible solution since they reward closeness or resemblance by relaxing the requirement for exact matches between the forecast and observations.