Observations from the High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer during the 2016 NOAA SHOUT ENSO and Tropical Cyclone Campaigns

The paper presents results from the High-Altitude MMIC Sounding Radiometer (HAMSR) during the 2016 NOAA Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technology (SHOUT) campaign.  HAMSR is a 25 channel cross-track scanning microwave sounder with channels near the 60 and 118 GHz oxygen lines and the 183 GHz water vapor line.  In 2015 and 2016, it participated in the NOAA SHOUT campaign on the NASA Global Hawk Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV).  The 2016 campaign featured a winter component in February, focused on winter storms and atmospheric rivers associated with the 2016 El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) condition and a summer component in August-September, focused on tropical cyclones in the Atlantic.  The objective of the SHOUT campaign is to demonstrate the forecast improvement of significant weather events enabled by the long-duration and far-reaching capability of the Global Hawk aircraft instrumented with in situ and remote sensing instruments.  In addition to HAMSR, the plane carried the HIWRAP radar to measure precipitation and winds and dropsondes to provide in situ vertical profiles of temperature, wind and humidity.

HAMSR’s primary data products, in addition to brightness temperature swath imagery, are 3-dimentional profiles of temperature, water vapor and precipitation.  To support the rapid response aspect of the SHOUT campaign, these products are produced and validated against each dropsondes released in real-time for assimilation into forecast models.  In addition to the raw environmental data, real-time analyzed products are also produced.  For the summer campaign, this includes storm centric representations of the precipitation and thermodynamic structure.  In addition, observations of the warm core anomaly at multiple levels are used to provide a real-time estimate of storm intensity using an algorithm developed from the previous five years of campaign data.  For the winter campaign, high resolution observations of the 3-D structure transecting an atmospheric river provide estimates of water flux when combined with the wind information from the dropsondes.  The HAMSR observations during the winter and summer campaign will be discussed, focusing on the how the real-time products are used to improve forecasting of significant weather events.