Environmental Characterization Evaluation of 557th Global Forecast System Analyses

Over the past decade the incorporation of atmospheric effects has increased in military engineering applications. These applications infuse meteorological parameters such as visibility as well as radiative transfer model products into decision aids supporting mobility or targeting. Recent advances in operational global weather models towards incorporating atmospheric aerosols have introduced a need to evaluate the overall performance in environmental characterization when applied to decision aids. Unlike standard meteorological parameters that can be compared with satellite, radiosonde, and surface observations, a limited amount of daily aerosol observations are available to compare with the model analysis. Additional techniques and methodologies need to be explored to evaluate the ability of operational global atmospheric chemistry models characterize the environmental state.

This presentation will discuss an environmental characterization evaluation methodology that is under development at USACE Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory in collaboration with the U.S. Air Force 557^th WW. This methodology incorporates the radiative transfer parameters from global forecast analyses (i.e., GALWEM/CLASSIC) and a radiative transfer model to evaluate the output against satellite radiance observations. This modeling framework provides a means for comparing top of atmosphere nadir reflectance data with model-generated values. If successful, this methodology could provide insight into model skill at predicting the environmental profile characteristics and have a subsequent impact on improving the utility of decision aids for military engineering applications.