J11.5
Impacts of Improved Quality Control for GOES Imager Radiance Assimilation on Tropical Cyclone Forecasts Using HWRF
Impacts of Improved Quality Control for GOES Imager Radiance Assimilation on Tropical Cyclone Forecasts Using HWRF
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Wednesday, 7 January 2015: 9:30 AM
230 (Phoenix Convention Center - West and North Buildings)
The Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES), GOES-13, GOES-15 and GOES-R, have been and will be providing high temporal- and spatial-resolution image radiance observations, which allows the structural evolution of extreme weather systems to be captured in real time. The direct radiance assimilation of four imager channels from GOES-13 and -15 using the current state-of-art the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) analysis system resulted a positive impact on hurricane track and intensity forecasts. A detailed analysis of GOES imager data assimilation revealed a systematic increase of analysis increments (O-A) compared with background innovations (O-B) for those data that have small O-B values, especially for GOES-13 and -15 channels 2 and 4 over ocean. Such a phenomena is found to be associated with either an existence of some large outliers in these surface-sensitive channels or a cancellation of radiance contributions from clouds and water vapor content. An improved quality control algorithm is proposed, which results in a more significant positive impact of GOES imager radiance assimilation on hurricane forecasts when the new quality control algorithm is incorporated into HWRF.