Evaluating the Impact of Vertical Profiling Mesonet Design on Rapidly Updating Convective Allowing Ensemble Forecasting

The development and proliferation of ground-based remote profilers and uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) have brought the atmospheric observing community closer to the realization of the operational vertical profiling mesonets. Assimilating observations from such profiling networks may be especially valuable to rapidly-updating convective allowing forecast systems as the low-levels of the atmosphere are currently poorly observed, but have significant influence on the initiation and evolution of deep convection. In order to help facilitate the development of such networks, efficient and cost effective designs need to be researched. This study uses observations system simulation experiments with high-fidelity simulators of infrared spectrometers (IRS), microwave radiometers (MWR), UAS and Doppler lidars to research the design of vertical profiling mesonets with a focus on their impact on convective allowing ensemble forecasting. The OSSEs were performed for three severe convective events. For these events, vertical profiling mesonets made significant improvements to the representation of the most intense storms in the forecasts, however, due to substantial vertically correlated errors in vertical profiling observations, care must be taken to avoid collapsing the ensemble spread of the forecasts. Simulated mesonets that combined IRS, MWR, and Doppler lidar at all sites tended to outperform mesonets that only used one remote profiler or UAS. These OSSEs also showed that forecast improvement from a single state-wide mesonet is limited to the first 1-2 hours of the forecast, which highlights the need for these mesonets to be implemented on potentially larger scales.