Evaluation of temperature analyses from the Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) during mountain valley cold pool events

The Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) is the first step in a multi-year effort to develop an “Analysis of Record”. The RTMA project is motivated by a need across the National Weather Service (NWS) for a high resolution surface objective analysis to support forecast operations. Many NWS forecast offices are already using the RTMA to verify grid-based forecasts. Recent evaluation efforts have shown that the RTMA struggles to define the temperature profile over deep mountain valleys during strong inversion events. A number of changes have been made to the RTMA's 2DVar analysis code, background field and terrain over the past year to help mitigate this problem. This poster will examine recent performance of the RTMA temperature analysis during cold pool events by comparing analysis solutions to point observations and locally generated MatchObsAll objective analyses.