OBSTAT documention

This documentation was written by Paul Poli in April 2006 and is regularly updated since then.

 Abstract

The OBSTAT software computes and plots statistics on observations assimilated in the ECMWF or Meteo France assimilation suite. One common application of OBSTAT is to produce statistics of observation minus background and observation minus analysis quantities. One assimilation time period is sufficient to run OBSTAT, but statistics over several assimilation time periods can be cumulated to produce statistics over an entire experiment, for example. OBSTAT relies on the Observation Data Base (ODB) to extract the observation minus first

 History

 13/03/2006 P. Poli 0.0 First version.
 15/03/2006 P. Poli 0.1 Enhanced section IV to enable use of text outputs from OBSTAT.
 01/03/2007 P. Poli 0.2 Addition of observation and background error diagnostics
 27/07/2007 P. Poli 0.21 Q&A: How to deal with inisoftstat problems, How to define new domains, How to compare two experiments using different cycles.
 19/02/2008 P. Poli 0.3 Upgrade for cycle 33; support for IASI, SEVIRI and ASCAT
 10/04/2008 P. Poli 0.4 Support for 3-hour cutoffs
 17/04/2008 P. Poli 0.5 Support for radar winds
 04/06/2008 P. Poli 0.6 Major change after phasing with ECMWF CY33R2. Change of item numbers.

 User’s guide

see joined pdf file