Updates to Environmental Observation Usage in JEDI Skylab

The Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) is an interagency partnership to enable research for applying satellite data and research to operational goals in environmental analysis and prediction. One of the JCSDA projects is for the Joint Effort for Data Assimilation Integration (JEDI). JEDI scientists and software engineers coordinate and collaborate on work with the partners to provide a unified data assimilation framework for research and operational use. This project’s main objective is to reduce or avoid redundant work within the community, increase the efficiency of research, and assist in the transition from development teams to operational use. The JEDI system is designed to easily implement multiple options for simulating observations, implement quality control, and specify the observation error. The generic component where this is specified is called the Unified Observation Operator (UFO). By abstraction of the model interfaces the observation object can be passed to different observation operators. For example for GNSS-RO the JEDI UFO component includes the NOAA NBAM operator, one from the UK Met Office, and another option based on the ROPP from the EUMETSAT ROM-SAF. Similarly for radiances the CRTM and RTTOV operators are implemented for radiance assimilation. The JEDI UFO also allows specification of different observation error models, key coefficients and parameters for these error models are set through yaml input files, and error matrices can be read in via external files. In the past year, the JCSDA team and their partners have worked to establish the vast majority of data sources for the current operational NWP systems. The have included the wide array of in-site from radiosonde, aircraft, synop and metar, ship and buoy as well as atmospheric motion vectors, scatterometer winds, and radiances from infrared sounders and imagers. Work on efficient decoding of these observations from various sources, error specification and quality control filtering is active and ongoing with validation efforts being undertaken at the partner agencies with support from the JCSDA. In addition, the JCSDA has been exploring and fostering work to include new operators such as those for ground and space based radar, airborne radio occultation and advancement in all-sky radiance assimilation and exploring visible and UV reflectances. To demonstrate the capabilities and continually verify the assimilation pathways JCSDA has developed the Skylab application which has been released quarterly since July 2022. We will show a summary of some of these capabilities that were demonstrated with the JEDI Skylab application. The ability to rapidly integrate existing and new data types and demonstrate them in a viable system is a key emphasis for the development of the JCSDA JEDI Skylab system.