Forecast Impacts of Observations from WindBorne Long-Duration Weather Balloons

WindBorne Systems has developed a novel balloon-based observation platform where constellations of balloons are flown throughout the troposphere over extended periods of time. Each of the balloons can fly for many days (up to 16 days) and be remotely controlled to ascend and descend from a few hundred meters above the surface to the lower stratosphere, collecting vertical profiles of pressure, temperature, humidity, and wind speed and direction. During winter of 2022, WindBorne flew 65 balloons, collecting vertical profiles across the Pacific Ocean over a one month period. Additionally, during a 2 month period beginning early August 2022, observations were collected from 85 balloons that were flown in the tropical Atlantic and 84 balloons that were flown in the Arctic.

Observation simulation experiments (OSEs) have been run for both the winter 2022 and late summer/fall 2022 observation periods where the GFS forecast output from runs with the addition of WindBorne observations assimilated (experimental run) were compared output from GFS runs where only operational observations (control) were assimilated. Initially, this OSE has been run at a coarse resolution (~25 km) and the OSE is currently being repeated at full GFS resolution (~13 km). The initial results from the 25 km runs show that WindBorne observations are contributing positively to 2-6 day forecasts over both North America and the Northern Hemisphere. The results from the coarse and fine resolution runs will be presented, showing forecast impact of observations for standard parameters such as temperature, geopotential height and winds throughout the troposphere, as well as forecasts of tropical cyclone tracks and intensity.