COMFORT: Continuous MeteoSwiss Forecast Quality Score

Since 1985, MeteoSwiss uses a global score for systematically assessing the general weather forecasts issued by the regional forecasting centers. This assessment is done for the following two main reasons: it is used for administrative purposes, as the weather centers are expected to communicate to the general public and to the government the evolution of the quality of their forecasts. On the other side, the forecasters need to know the performance of their predictions, in order to be able to improve them. In 2013, we developed a new verification scheme which allows to take more benefits of the evolution of the forecasting system as well as of the current automated observation networks. This verification scheme, called COMFORT (for COntinuous MeteoSwiss FORecast qualiTy), was designed for communication purposes and aims to provide the management, but also external entities such as policy makers, media, etc. with a measure of the quality of general forecasts provided by MeteoSwiss. The score COMFORT was developed within the MeteoSwiss operational forecasting system but, in spite of its apparent specificity, it is based on ideas that might be transposable to other weather forecasting services