Himawari-8 AHI Radiance Assimilation with NOAA GDAS system

A new era in environmental satellites began in October 2014 when Japan's Himawari-8 attained geostationary orbit. Main instrument of the satellites is the Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) which is comparable to the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) on board the U.S. GOES-R class satellites. Efforts are currently ongoing at the NOAA/NESDIS Center for Satellite Applications and Research (STAR) to assimilate Himawari-8 AHI radiance measurements in the NOAA Global Data Assimilation System. All plumbing in the Grid-point Statistical Interpolation (GSI) system to allow assimilation of Himawari-8 AHI radiance has been completed, and the impact of the real AHI observations is determined in the global framework at JCSDA. All sky (clear, cloudy, and precipitation) IR radiance of Himawari-8 will be expand beyond the assimilation of only clear sky IR channels. It is toward the ultimate goal to routinely assimilate these data to improve global weather forecasts as well as to improve global cloud and precipitation analyses. The cycling experiments with/without real H8 AHI have been performed to assess its Analysis/Forecast impacts. The preliminary scientific results about the ingestion of Himawari-8 AHI data and the impact on the NOAA GFS model forecast will be presented in this Conference.