The Impacts of Assimilating DAWN and HALO Observations on Numerical Simulations of Tropic Convections Associated with African Easterly Waves During NASA CPEX-CV

One of the scientific objectives of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)’s Convective Process Experiment - Cabo Verde (CPEX-CV) in September 2022 is to examine the influence of observations onboard the NASA DC-8 medium-altitude aircraft on the understanding and predictions of tropical Atlantic weather systems. This study assesses the impacts of assimilating Doppler Aerosol WiNd lidar (DAWN) wind profiles and High-Altitude Lidar Observatory (HALO) water vapor profiles on numerical simulations of tropical convective systems. Data collected from Research Flight #7 (RF07) on 16 September 2022 were assimilated into the mesoscale community Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model using the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI)-based three-dimensional ensemble-variational hybrid data assimilation (3DEnVAR) system. The convective processes embedded in an African easterly wave (AEW) over the tropical East Atlantic are evaluated with a series of numerical experiments. Results show that the experiment assimilating both DAWN and HALO produces the best numerical simulations of convective system evolution among all experiments, mainly due to better-reproducing precipitation and the dissipation of the conventions associated with the AEW. More experiments with NASA CPEX-CV and CPEX-AW cases and the sensitivity of the analyses and simulations to the error characteristics of the data are in process. Results will be reported in the presentation.