GOES-R mesoscale product development at CIRA and STAR/RAMMB

Numerical simulations and existing in situ and satellite data are being used to better understand the capabilities of the advanced GOES-R instruments for mesoscale weather analysis and prediction. The emphasis is on ABI and GLM applications to mesoscale atmospheric phenomena that evolve on time scales faster than, and at spatial resolution greater than, those normally sampled by current GOES, with the goal to reduce the time needed to fully utilize GOES-R as soon as possible after launch. Our palette of research products includes improved forecasts of tropical cyclone formation, rapid intensity changes, and transition to extra-tropical cyclones. We also study wintertime midlatitude cyclones with a focus on the tropospheric structure and tropopause folds. We generate synthetic GOES-R ABI imagery to support wind requests for severe weather, aviation requests for particle size, and GOES-R ABI proxy data requests for wildfire and agricultural fire events including smoke plumes. Our data assimilation technique is applied to severe weather and hurricane cases and is based on extracting maximum information in order to significantly improve the use of the GOES-R data.

We will present examples of products from the different areas covered by our research.