Identification

Title

Estimation of TAMDAR observational error and assimilation experiments

Abstract

Tropospheric Airborne Meteorological Data Reporting (TAMDAR) observations are becoming a major data source for numerical weather prediction (NWP) because of the advantages of their high spatiotemporal resolution and humidity measurements. In this study, the estimation of TAMDAR observational errors, and the impacts of TAMDAR observations with new error statistics on short-term forecasts are presented. The observational errors are estimated by a three-way collocated statistical comparison. This method employs collocated meteorological reports from three data sources: TAMDAR, radiosondes, and the 6-h forecast from a Weather Research and Forecasting Model (WRF). The performance of TAMDAR observations with the new error statistics was then evaluated based on this model, and the WRF Data Assimilation (WRFDA) three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3DVAR) system. The analysis was conducted for both January and June of 2010. The experiments assimilate TAMDAR, as well as other conventional data with the exception of non-TAMDAR aircraft observations, every 6 h, and a 24-h forecast is produced. The standard deviation of the observational error of TAMDAR, which has relatively stable values regardless of season, is comparable to radiosondes for temperature, and slightly smaller than that of a radiosonde for relative humidity. The observational errors in wind direction significantly depend on wind speeds. In general, at low wind speeds, the error in TAMDAR is greater than that of radiosondes; however, the opposite is true for higher wind speeds. The impact of TAMDAR observations on both the 6- and 24-h WRF forecasts during the studied period is positive when using the default observational aircraft weather report (AIREP) error statistics. The new TAMDAR error statistics presented here bring additional improvement over the default error.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7ff3t32

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

geoscientificInformation

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

Text

originating controlled vocabulary

title

Resource Type

reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

End position

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2012-08-01T00:00:00Z

Frequency of update

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Copyright 2012 American Meteorological Society (AMS). Permission to use figures, tables, and brief excerpts from this work in scientific and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is determined to be "fair use" under Section 107 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law (17 USC, as revised by P.L. 94-553) does not require the Society's permission. Republication, systematic reproduction, posting in electronic form on servers, or other uses of this material, except as exempted by the above statements, requires written permission or license from the AMS. Additional details are provided in the AMS Copyright Policies, available from the AMS at 617-227-2425 or amspubs@ametsoc.org. Permission to place a copy of this work on this server has been provided by the AMS. The AMS does not guarantee that the copy provided here is an accurate copy of the published work.

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

contact position

OpenSky Support

organisation name

UCAR/NCAR - Library

full postal address

PO Box 3000

Boulder

80307-3000

email address

opensky@ucar.edu

web address

http://opensky.ucar.edu/

name: homepage

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact