Identification

Title

Impact of airborne radio occultation observations on short term precipitation forecasts of an Atmospheric River

Abstract

Atmospheric River Reconnaissance (AR Recon) collects targeted observations during major winter weather events associated with heavy precipitation and flooding on the US West Coast. Ten WC‐130J weather reconnaissance aircraft equipped with Global Navigation Satellite System airborne radio occultation (ARO) technology provide additional data on the broader AR environment, specifically as the AR approaches the coastline. This study evaluates the impact of assimilating ARO bending angle observations using the Model for Prediction Across Scales—Atmosphere—Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (MPAS‐JEDI). Experiments use the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter and Three‐Dimensional Ensemble‐Variational algorithms. The control experiment assimilates only global conventional data, while the other experiments incorporate additional ARO observations. The results show that ARO assimilation corrects moisture, temperature, and wind fields, and reduces the error in the integrated vapor transport forecast at landfall. The changes mitigate overestimated precipitation in mountainous regions of Washington and Idaho.

Resource type

document

Resource locator

Unique resource identifier

code

https://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d7571hfh

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

2025-07-16T00:00:00Z

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

<span style="font-family:Arial;font-size:10pt;font-style:normal;" data-sheets-root="1">Copyright author(s). This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</span>

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