Assimilation of HIWRAP Wind Observations from Hurricane Matthew (2016)

The NASA High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP) is a downward-pointing, conically-scanning Doppler radar that was mounted on the NASA Global Hawk UAS during the recent NOAA Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) field campaign. Previously, Sippel et al. (2014) demonstrated that ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) assimilation of HIWRAP Doppler velocity and Doppler-derived velocity-azimuth (VAD) wind profiles improved forecasts of track and intensity for Hurricane Karl (2010). In this study, we further investigate the impact of HIWRAP wind data in cases from the Hurricane Matthew (2016) SHOUT missions. Observations are assimilated into HWRF using NOAA/AOML/HRD’s EnKF-based Hurricane Ensemble Data Assimilation System (HEDAS), and analyses and forecasts from experiments that assimilate radial velocity observations and those that assimilate VAD retrievals are compared.