Gridded Meteorological Ensemble Tool (GMET)

The Gridded Meteorological Ensemble Tool (GMET) uses available station data to create a continuous, gridded analysis of temperature and precipitation that, unlike other tools, incorporates historical data and estimates potential prediction errors in its assessments. So, while it helps fill in the gaps where meteorological stations are sparse, it also estimates the uncertainty of the resulting dataset.

When SEI worked with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Bolivian scientists to study the country’s water balance between 1980 and 2016, it was the first time GMET was used outside the United States. By using GMET, they produced daily climate grids for the 36-year period, when Bolivia’s dramatically varied topography and relative sparseness of weather stations would have previously made such an effort more difficult. The resulting dataset served as an input to SEI’s flagship water modelling tool, WEAP.

Since then, the open-source tool has been applied in hydrological model development in individual river basins throughout the country and various other studies.

Uses for GMET range from hydrologic data assimilation studies to atmospheric model validation.