Radar Data Assimilation in a Regional Model of KMA

Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) has had many ongoing efforts for using Doppler radar data in regional and storm scale numerical forecasting. As one of the efforts, in 2004, the assimilation of radial velocity and reflectivity was introduced into the analysis system using three-dimensional variational (3dVar) method on a regional numerical model of KMA, which is based on MM5 with 10 km horizontal resolution. The methods for thinning and super observation to deal with multi radar observations used in this study will be presented. The encouraging results obtained by this study such as improved precipitation forecasting will also be shown.