Wind Gust Speed Analysis in RTMA

The Real-Time Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA) is a NOAA-NWS gridded surface

analysis system developed at the Environmental Modeling Center (EMC) of

the National Centers for Environmental Prediction in collaboration with the Global

Systems Division (GSD) of the Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL). One

of its important applications is to provide a comprehensive set of high spatial and

temporal resolution analyses that can be used to monitor potential severe weather

events. In this work, wind gust speed is added as a new control variable in the

RTMA, and the gust observations from various sources, especially Mesonet

data, are examined and assimilated over the CONUS region. Wind gust

background fields are generated by downscaling of Rapid Update Cycle

(RUC) 1h forecasts, and terrain-following anisotropic background error

covariances are utilized in the RTMA's 2DVar procedure. Preliminary

analysis results and experiments will be presented at the conference.