Evaluation of the 3DRTMA Through Independent Radar and Lidar Wind Profiles from the PERiLS Field Campaign (2022-23)

The PERiLS (Propagation, Evolution, and Rotation in Linear Storms) field campaign, conducted across the Southeastern United States during 2022 and 2023, aims to enhance our understanding of tornadoes and their interactions with the environment in the southeast US. The suite of instrumentation for PERiLS provides an unprecedented data set of independent observations including radar and lidar wind profiles, crucial for evaluating analysis systems such as the 3-dimensional Real Time Mesoscale Analysis (3DRTMA) system developed at the NOAA Global Systems Laboratory.

For this evaluation, we focused on the case from March 22 to 23, 2022. The Rapid Refresh Forecasting System (RRFS) retrospective experiment was run to provide hourly background for 3DRTMA. Then a separate 3DRTMA experiment was conducted to assimilate all conventional observations, but monitors independent radar and lidar wind from the PERiLS field campaign to examine the impact of conventional observations in the 3DRTMA. From those independent wind profiles, we can understand how and to what extent the aircraft and radar radial wind observations impact the analysis. It shows that aircraft observations play a positive impact from 950-350 hPa while radial winds play a major positive impact role at 700 hPa for 00Z. Both observations have a mixed impacts for other cycles. Further details of the experiments and results will be presented.