Ongoing Upgrades to NOAA's Real Time Mesoscale Analysis System

The NOAA Real-Time and UnRestricted Mesoscale Analysis (RTMA and URMA, respectively) creates analyses of near-surface sensible weather elements, cloud fields, and precipitation on domains that match those of the National Digital Forecast Database. Recently, an upgraded version of the RTMA (v2.6) was implemented in Dec. of 2017 which introduced the RTMA-Rapid Update (RTMA-RU) system over the contiguous United States (CONUS). RTMA-RU produces a new analysis every 15 minutes with low latency for users in need of quick-turnaround, situational awareness products (e.g. the aviation community). Version 2.7 is expected to be implemented in the Fall of 2018 and development is already underway for version 2.8.

Over the years stakeholders and forecasters have played a fundamental role in providing feedback that has helped inform the continued development of the RTMA suite. This presentation will highlight several of these feedback-inspired developments with special attention to near- and long term upgrades. Such topics will include a near-real time station blacklisting capability, enhancements to the background error covariance to fit observations more appropriately, expansion of the significant wave height analysis to outside CONUS domains, expansion of the precipitation analysis - including filling offshore coverage gaps in CONUS, revisiting the use of crowd-sourced mesonet wind observations, a quality assessment for aviation users, the assimilation of radiance observations for improved 2m T analyses, and the ultimate long-term plan of upgrading the RTMA suite to three dimensions and sub-hourly updates, which is now underway in collaboration with ESRL/GSD colleagues.

Disclaimer: This research is in response to requirements and funding by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the FAA.