Dr. F.A. Rihan
Peel D14, University of Salford
Manchester, M5 4WT, England.
OBJECTIVES
As part of an ongoing research project into Data Assimilation of Doppler Radar Data into Met Office Unified Model, a two-week visit was made to the National Centre for Atmospheric Ressearch (NCAR), in Boulder, Colorado, and Oklahoma Weather Center, in Norman , Oklahoma.
4D-Var is currently at an early stage of development in the UK, with only conventional data being ingested into models (that is, no radar input). NCAR developed and applied 4D-Var for assimilation of reflectivity and radial velocity data from single radars in both research and operational situations. This work provides some insight into the structure required to accommodate Doppler radar data into an operational 4D-Var system.
This visit was funded by the Universities Weather Research Network, and its purposes were to find out: What quality control techniques are they used for radial winds? How do they do the superobbing of data? What resolution, range and number of elevations do people typical have available? Are 8 elevations enough? How are the errors specified? Given that signal to noise ratio is related to scan speed, are the errors related to scan speed?
Meeting Agenda: