Assimilation of GOES-R ABI radiances within NOAA Global Assimilation System

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) is a primary instrument on GOES-R imaging the ocean and environment on the Earth. ABI provides approximately four to five times of the spatial and temporal coverage than the current system, and is therefore provide improved product (cloud formation, atmospheric motion, convection, land sea surface temperature, ocean dynamics, etc.) compared to the current system.

The retrieved radiance data from GOES-R ABI are analyzed via the Community Observation Assessment Tool. The comparison of sea surface temperature with ECMWF model forecast shows general agreement over the global sea surface. Quality control has been applied to correct the bias of ABI radiance data. Further quality control is done to filter out the abnormally high temperature data.

With the knowledge gained by assessing the ABI radiance data, ABI data is properly formatted and ingested into NOAA Global Assimilation System, i.e., the 3-D hybrid ensemble variational GSI. The statistics of O-B and O-A in GSI for radiances are analyzed.  Innovated quality control in GSI is developed for ABI based on the pre-assimilation assessment.

Penalty as a function of model iterations is shown for multiple observation errors in order to optimize the convergence during minimization. The impact of ABI radiance in GSI analysis is independently assessed by comparing with ECMWF analysis. Finally, the impact of ABI data in the forecast model is analyzed with the Verification Statistics Data Base (VSDB).