Identification

Title

Impact of loss of U.S. microwave and radio occultation observations in operational numerical weather prediction in support of the U.S. data gap mitigation activities

Abstract

As the U.S. polar-orbiting satellites NOAA-15, -18, and -19 and NASA’s Aqua satellite reach the ends of their lives, there may be a loss in redundancy between their microwave (MW) soundings, and the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) on the Suomi–National Polar-Orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite. With the expected delay in the launch of the next generation of U.S. polar-orbiting satellites, there may be a loss in at least some of the U.S. MW data. There may also be a significant decrease in the number of radio occultation (RO) observations. The mainstay of the global RO system, the COSMIC constellation of six satellites is already past the end of its nominal lifetime. A replacement of RO soundings in the tropics is planned with the launch of COSMIC-2 satellites in 2016. However, the polar constellation of COSMIC-2 will not be launched until 2018 or 2019, and complete funding for this constellation is not assured. Using the NCEP operational forecast system, forecasts for March–April 2013 are carried out in which various combinations of the U.S. MW and all RO soundings are removed. The main results are that the forecasts are only slightly degraded in the Northern Hemisphere, even with all of these observations removed. The decrease in accuracy is considerably greater in the Southern Hemisphere, where the greatest forecast degradation occurs when the RO observations are removed. Overall, these results indicate that the possible gap in RO observations is potentially more significant than the possible gap in the U.S. MW data

Resource type

document

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code

http://n2t.net/ark:/85065/d76974sq

codeSpace

Dataset language

eng

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geoscientificInformation

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Text

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title

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reference date

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publication

effective date

2016-01-01T00:00:00Z

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publication

effective date

2015-04-01T00:00:00Z

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Copyright 2015 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.

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None

Responsible organisations

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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

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pointOfContact

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