Impact of Single-Doppler Radar Observations on Numerical Prediction of 7 May 1995 Oklahoma Squall Line

A package to assimilate single-Doppler radar data is being developed and tested for the Coupled Ocean/Atmosphere Mesoscale Prediction System (COAMPS) developed by the Naval Research Laboratory. This package consists of the radar data quality control,the three-dimensional wind retrieval and the thermodynamic retrieval. The quality control technique is to correct radial velocity errors caused by the range folding and velocity aliasing. The wind and thermodynamic retrieval is to retrieve three dimensional velocity increments and thermodynamic increments based on their corresponding model predicted values by minimizing the costfunction that is composed of the observational and dynamic constraints. The experiments have been conducted with level II WSW88D Doppler radar data from the VORTEX squall lines case of May 7,1995. The comparison has been made between the observational hourly precipitations and their corresponding analysis/prediction results with and without including radar data analysis during the model prediction.