Thursday, 10 January 2019: 4:15 PM
North 231C (Phoenix Convention Center - West and North Buildings)
We pose this question: How can the increased temporal and spatial resolution of GOES-R be used to improve the usefulness of blended Total Precipitable Water (TPW) products for forecasters? Currently, GOES-R TPW retrievals are not included in the NOAA operational blended TPW. That product relies primarily on passive microwave retrievals (NOAA Microwave Integrated Retrieval System - MiRS) and Global Positioning System (GPS) measurements over the CONUS. Research is in progress at CIRA under the GOES-R Risk Reduction program to incorporate GOES-R TPW into the blended TPW. The increased spatial and temporal resolution and especially the full disk coverage provide new opportunities to impact and improve the blended TPW product with GOES-R.
In order to best exploit the GOES-R capabilities, its error characteristics and sampling limits in cloudy areas must be reconciled with the heritage TPW inputs. Advances in advectively blending the TPW – using model winds to move the field to a common time as is done in the Morphed Integrated Microwave Imagery (MIMIC) TPW product – need to be incorporated along with forecaster feedback on desirable characteristics of the product.
Results showing GOES-R (GOES-16) TPW as compared to MiRS and GPS will be presented. Several blending approaches using the GOES data will be demonstrated. Metrics such as elimination of cloud-edge artifacts will be discussed.
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