Optimizing Assimilation of TROPICS Radiances for Tropical Cyclone Prediction in a Regional OSSE

The Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) constellation currently in development will be comprised of six Micro-sized Microwave Atmospheric Satellite (MicroMAS-2) CubeSats, each equipped with a 12-channel microwave radiometer providing measurements of temperature, moisture, precipitation, and cloud ice. An initial set of regional observing system simulation experiments (OSSEs), with synthetic radiances derived from the Nolan et al. (2013) hurricane nature run and assimilated into HWRF using an ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF), showed a positive impact on tropical cyclone analyses and forecasts when TROPICS observations were assimilated. In this study, we examine methods for optimizing the impact of the TROPICS observations, which include observation error modification based on the presence of clouds (Geer et al. 2014; Lawrence et al. 2015) and adaptive thinning (Reale et al. 2018).