An airborne Doppler radar radial wind forward operator for the ensemble Kalman filter hurricane data assimilation system at NOAA/AOML/HRD: Preliminary results

The Hurricane Research Division (HRD) at NOAA's Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory (AOML) routinely conducts flight missions into hurricanes to collect high-resolution inner-core data (by the NOAA P-3 aircraft), including flight-level, dropsonde, surface wind speed, and Doppler radar observations. In an attempt to maximize the value of these high-resolution inner-core data, the HRD has recently committed to the development of a state-of-the-art ensemble Kalman filter (EnKF) hurricane data assimilation system, as part of NOAA's Hurricane Intensity Improvement Program (HFIP).

Within the HRD's hurricane data assimilation system, airborne Doppler radar measurements are considered as one of the higher-priority tasks, as they provide very valuable high-resolution information on the overall tropical cyclone wind structure throughout the depth of the troposphere. In this talk, the pre-processing and assimilation systems involving the NOAA P-3 airborne Doppler radar estimates will be introduced and preliminary results from observing system simulation experiments will be presented.