Supporting and facilitating R2O transitions for satellite data assimilation at the DTC

Supporting and facilitating R2O transitions for satellite data assimilation at the DTC

Hui Shao, NCAR, Ming Hu, NOAA/ESRL, Don Stark, Kathryn Newman, Chunhua Zhou, Louisa Nance, Ying-Hwa Kuo, and Josh Hacker, NCAR

The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), in partnership with the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) and other operational and research institutions, provides operational data assimilation capabilities to the research community and helps transition research advances to operations. Currently, efforts are being made to enhance the partnership between the DTC and the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA), and provide support to the research community for advances in satellite data assimilation.

The DTC supports both variational and ensemble-based data assimilation systems. The Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation system is primarily a three dimensional (3D) variational analysis system. With an appropriate ensemble input, GSI can also be run with the 3D or 4D hybrid ensemble-variational (EnVar) technique. The GSI is being used for daily operations at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Air Force, and other operational agencies.

Since 2009, the DTC has been releasing the GSI code to the research community annually and providing user support. In 2015, the DTC began providing the operational NOAA Ensemble Kalman Filter (EnKF) system. This system is being operated as part of the GSI based hybrid (GSI-hybrid) system for NCEP Global Forecast System (GFS) operations. The GSI and EnKF share observation operators, and can assimilate both conventional and non-conventional data including radiances from satellite-borne instruments. Meanwhile, the DTC has been conducting tests to assess data assimilation system performance and observation impacts (e.g., satellite data impacts). The DTC also develops tools for verification against analyses, and both conventional and satellite data.

This paper will present an overview of current DTC community services and facilities, as well as some highlights on satellite data impact studies performed at the DTC in the past year. This paper will also discuss the potential to collaborate with JCSDA communities, along with measures that can be taken in such a collaboration, specifically supporting development of satellite data assimilation and research to operations (R2O) transitions.