Workshop: Observational campaigns for better weather forecasts

Often it is thought that observations exist to serve models. A commonplace idea in the atmospheric and climate sciences is that observations exist to 'verify', 'evaluate' or 'improve' models. In this talk I instead focus on how models can be used to guide observations. By identifying specific processes underlying a particular type of modeled behavior, models can instead be used to craft...

In the past decade, the German Aerospace Center was involved in a series of observational campaigns with various objectives, e.g. on atmospheric dynamics, cloud microphysics or atmospheric chemistry. This presentation gives an overview of active remote-sensing lidar and radar profile observations of winds, humidity, ozone, aerosols and clouds; i.e. parameters of potential relevance for...

Over the last decades the Swedish icebreaker Oden has had atmospheric research mission to the central Arctic four summers; 2001, 2008, 2014 & 2018. The data brought back from these expeditions provides invaluable detail on conditions and processes that can be used to test models and model formulations. But the field campaigns also rely on weather forecasts for the operations. One very special...

Météo-France/CNRM has a long experience and know-how in designing field experiments for developing and improving physical parameterizations for atmosphere, continental surfaces and ocean coupled models. The most outstanding field campaigns of the last decades include those coordinating in CAPITOUL on urban boundary layer in 2004-2005 (Masson et al, 2008), in AMMA on African Monsoon in 2006...

Although the most popular application of ensemble forecasts is the mean and forecast standard deviation, there is substantial information within the higher moment statistics of these datasets that can be used to evaluate the dynamics and predictability of dynamical systems. In addition, these ensemble-based sensitivity methods can be used to identify locations where additional observations...

Observation-model difference drive the development of parametrizations. Here we will show how the combination of aircraft, satellite and ground based observations as well as theoretical and seamless modelling has led to model improvements in the Met Office Unified Model. Examples to be discussed will include i) the Southern Ocean sea surface temperature bias that draws on a rich combination of...

Visualization is an important and ubiquitous tool in the daily work of atmospheric researchers to analyse data from simulations and observations, and field campaigns are no exception. Visualization techniques are applied during flight planning to analyse Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) output to perform weather forecasting under campaign-specific requirements, for example, to predict the...

Adjoint models can provide valuable insight into the practical limitations of our ability to predict weather systems, such as extratropical and tropical cyclones, and their associated high-impact weather. An adjoint model can be used for the efficient and rigorous computation of numerical weather prediction forecast sensitivity to changes in the initial state or an earlier point in the...

To follow

In recent years, field campaigns have deployed modern in-situ and remote-sensing instrumentation in diverse marine cloudy boundary layer regimes. For example, the CSET (2015) airborne campaign sampled across the NE Pacific stratocumulus-cumulus transition between California to Hawaii. The Southern Ocean Atmospheric Research program (2016-8) comprised four observational campaigns (SOCRATES,...

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) essentially relies on measurements of atmospheric variables for data assimilation, parameterization development and validation. Observatories and supersites nowadays provide comprehensive data sets from operational measurement programs which might be considered as a long-lasting field experiment taking into account the size and variety of measurements. These...

Numerical weather prediction (NWP) models applied on regional scales use a typical grid spacing of O(1 km). While such a grid spacing allows to start explicitly resolving convection - at least deep convection - several features of the flow remain of subgrid-scale nature, e.g. turbulence, shallow convection, or may be distorted by the coarse grid spacing. Large-eddy simulations (LES) with grid...

Mobile Radar-Lidar facilities are unique tools for cloud process analyses and case studies. The radar-lidar airborne platform (RALI) can be deployed on board the French SAFIRE aircraft (Falcon 20 or the ATR42 depending on the targeted areas). RALI consists of a combination of the multi beam 95 GHz Doppler radar RASTA (RAdar SysTem Airborne) and the Doppler high spectral resolution (D-HRS)...

Two recent Tropical Cyclone (TC) Forecast Demonstration Projects (TCFDP) have utilized new and innovative technologies and targeted observing strategies for improving TC track and intensity forecasting: 1) Sensing Hazards with Operational Unmanned Technologies (SHOUT, 2015-16) and 2) East Pacific Origins and Characteristics of Hurricanes (EPOCH, 2017). Both of these projects share the...

In 2011 the U.S. Working Group for Hurricane and Winter Storms Operations and Research approved a multi-year AXBT Demonstration Project to assess whether the collection of upper-ocean temperature observations during operational tropical cyclone (TC) reconnaissance missions could improve coupled numerical model forecasts of TC track and intensity. In 2017, the program was expanded to include...

A new aircraft observing strategy is proposed for obtaining much-needed atmospheric dropsonde observations throughout the entire depth of the troposphere within the inner core of Tropical Cyclones (TCs) and their environment during TC season, as well as over developing winter storm systems in the Central and Eastern Pacific (CPAC and EPAC) upstream from the U.S. West Coast Atmospheric River...

The inner core of tropical cyclone (TC) Lan was observed on 21-22 October 2017 by newly developed GPS dropsondes during the aircraft missions of the Tropical Cyclones-Pacific Asian Research Campaign for the Improvement of Intensity Estimations/Forecasts (T-PARCII). On 25-28 September 2018, the inner core of TC Trami was also observed by T-PARCII team with the support of Science and Technology...

Dropsonde observations from three research aircrafts in the north-Atlantic region as well as several hundred additionally launched radiosondes over Canada and Europe were collected during the transatlantic field campaign NAWDEX in autumn 2016. In addition, over 500 dropsondes were deployed during NOAA’s SHOUT and Reconnaissance missions in the west-Atlantic basin, complementing the...

The Atmospheric River Reconnaissance project “AR Recon” formulated a targeting method focused on AR landfall prediction on the U.S. West Coast, where AR landfall position forecast errors at 1-4 days lead time range from 200-400 km on average (Wick et al. 2013, DeFlorio et al. 2018), and can contribute to significant errors in extreme precipitation forecasts (e.g., Ralph et al. 2010, 2011). ...

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The scientific aim of the North Atlantic Waveguide and Downstream Impact Experiment (NAWDEX; Schaefler et al. 2018) was to increase the physical understanding and to quantify the effects of diabatic processes on disturbances of the jet stream and their influence on downstream high-impact weather. The field campaign in September/October 2016 involved four research aircraft which performed in...

The main goal of the study is to analyze the representation of the Stalactite Cyclone (29 September-2 October 2016) in a hierarchy of models (mesoscale NWP model, global NWP model, climate models). The Stalactite Cyclone is an extratropical cyclone that has been intensively observed during the international field campaign NAWDEX. Its later stage of development is associated with the onset of a...

In August 2018, the Aeolus satellite carrying the first UV Doppler lidar in space (ALADIN) was successfully launched. The particular gap that Aeolus is closing in the global observing system is measurements of winds in cloud free regions and thus we expect Aeolus to substantially improve analysis fields and subsequently predictions of synoptic- to planetary-scale wave phenomena in the Tropics....

The Iceland Greenland Seas Project (IGP) is a coordinated atmosphere-ocean research program investigating climate processes in the source region of the densest waters of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. During February and March 2018, a field campaign was executed over the Iceland and southern Greenland Seas that utilized a range of observing platforms to investigate critical...

The Special Observing Periods (SOPs) within the Year of Polar Prediction aim to provide enhanced observations for the benefit of model improvement for NWP. SOP1 and SOP2 provide additional radiosoundings for a winter and summer period during 2018. For the third one, the SOP3, it is the ambition to coordinate additional observations complementary to the MOSAiC effort. The aim is to target warm...

Extensive surface based remote sensing observations of Arctic clouds have been made during two recent research cruises: Arctic Cloud in Summer Experiment (ACSE, 2014) and the Microbiology-Ocean-Cloud Coupling in the High Arctic (MOCCHA, 2018). The cloud properties were retrieved using Cloudnet from measurements by Doppler cloud radar, lidar, scanning microwave radiometer, and 6-hourly...

Unusual states of the Arctic regions, for example, less sea-ice extent, high temperatures in the atmosphere and ocean, much snowfall, and extreme weather events in the Arctic and beyond, have been prominent in recent years in particular during winter time. Those phenomena are scientifically important for understanding the air-ice-sea coupled physical processes and improving skills of numerical...

Mountains have a profound impact on synoptic- and meso-scale atmospheric processes. They also shape the transfer of heat, momentum and mass (water or trace gases) between the ground, planetary boundary layer and the free atmosphere. An integral part of past international research programmes that focused on the impact of mountains on the atmosphere (e.g., ALPEX, PYREX and MAP) was a deployment...

The Institute of Atmospheric Physics of the German Aerospace Center (DLR) organized and participated in three observational campaigns on atmospheric gravity waves (GWs) in the past 7 years: GW-LCYCLE I (Kiruna, Sweden, 2013), DEEPWAVE (Christchurch, New Zealand, 2014) and GW-LCYCLE II (Kiruna, Sweden, 2016). The overreaching goal of all the campaigns with combined airborne and ground-based...

Three long-duration stratospheric balloons were released in February 2010 from Seychelles Island (5°S) by the French space agency (CNES), within the pre-Concordiasi campaign. Once at their float altitude at $\sim$20 km, these balloons drift on constant-density surfaces, and are simply advected by the wind. The pre-Concordiasi flights lasted for 3 months each. In-situ meteorological...

For more than 50 years of experience, the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) has been supporting scientific ballooning, which remains the most cost effective means to access to near space science.
This paper will give a quick overview of the CNES capabilities and services for operational balloon activities: Zero Pressure Balloon, Super Pressure Balloon and Sounding balloons. It will...

Over the past decade, significant progress has been made in the global ocean observing system (GOOS), which is monitoring much of the upper ocean on a global scale in real time with multiple observing platforms. But observation of air-sea fluxes has been relying on fixed surface moored buoys and research and voluntary ships with limited spatial coverage. As a result, the current GOOS is not...

Authors: Claudia Acquistapace, Maximilian Maahn, Ulrich Löhnert, Pavlos Kollias

Liquid clouds substantially contribute to Earth’s radiation budget but are still poorly represented in global circulation models (GCMs), i.e. due to uncertainties in the description of the cloud-scale microphysical processes such as drizzle production. Drizzle production in pure liquid clouds is the main mechanism...

Analysis of observations and ERA5 comparison in the data sparse Arctic Ocean

Takehiko Nose1, Takuji Waseda1, Kodaira Tsubasa1, and Jun Inoue2.

1 Department of Ocean Technology Policy and Environment, the University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan
2 National Institute for Polar Research, Tachikawa, Japan

R/V Mirai conducts observational campaigns to the Arctic Ocean annually. Observations in the...

Atmospheric River Reconnaissance (AR Recon) is an airborne meteorology field campaign designed to improve the observation of impactful weather events ahead of landfall on the U.S. West Coast. Observations of the full profile of moisture, winds and temperature within atmospheric rivers (AR) during their evolution and propagation over the northeastern Pacific Ocean provides useful information...

TerraMaris is a future airborne field campaign based between Java, Indonesia and Christmas Island (Aus.) and will be supported by two instrumented ground sites, and oceanographic measurements.

In advance of the airborne Intensive Operating Period (IOP) in January 2020 we have begun to undertake a number of planning "Dry-Runs" in order to simulate the day-to-day field campaign operations. We...

A global atmospheric data assimilation system called ALEDAS comprised of AFES (Atmospheric GCM) and the LETKF has been developed in our research team to generate an experimental global ensemble reanalysis called ALERA2. The ALERA2 and ALEDAS have been used to conduct several OSE studies to assess impacts of special observations obtained during some observational campaigns, especially on the...

The mission of the Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is to insure progress in the atmospheric sciences by providing end-to-end support for observational field campaigns, nationally and internationally. EOL offers scientific, technical, operational, data and logistics support in an effort to continually drive progress in atmospheric...

Forecast Informed Reservoir Operations (FIRO) is a proposed alternative management strategy that aims to use data from watershed monitoring and state of the art weather and streamflow forecasting to improve water supply reliability without impairing flood protection. Lake Mendocino, located in northern California, US, is a current testbed for this strategy. This project was guided by the Lake...

Landfalling Atmospheric Rivers (ARs) provide between 30-50% of precipitation but can also cause major flooding events in the western U.S. Accurate forecasts of a landfalling AR can improve water management decisions. Sparse observations over the Pacific have limited the improvement of forecast skills for the western U.S. due to the poor upstream initial conditions. While the numerical weather...

The oceans affect the fundamental processes that drive our weather and climate. Saildrone designs and manufactures wind and solar powered unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) which make cost-effective ocean data collection possible at scale. Saildrones are instrumented with a full suite of ocean, meteorological, and fisheries acoustic instruments and have been successfully deployed over the past...

The DACCIWA project addressed weather, climate and air pollution problems in southern West Africa. The main field campaign in June-July 2016 produced the most comprehensive atmospheric dataset over this region to date. Operational products from ECMWF and other centres were used for a better planning of the field observations. The following conclusions from DACCIWA are highlighted as directly...

High-impact weather events are often accompanied by heavy precipitation over prolonged periods of time; yet, our understanding and ability to predict heavy precipitation remains deficient. This issue is of utmost importance for forecasting and scientific communities alike because heavy precipitation events can impact communities all around the world. Motivated by these issues and implications,...

The exchange of heat, momentum, and mass in the atmosphere over mountainous terrain is controlled by synoptic-scale dynamics, thermally-driven mesoscale circulations and turbulence.

Exchange processes at the land surface and within the atmospheric boundary layer are represented in numerical weather prediction and climate simulation models by empirically tuned and inherently uncertain...

Because of its high vertical resolution and global sampling, spaceborne GNSS radio occultation has had a large impact on operational numerical weather prediction. Implementation of this technology on aircraft greatly increases the density of this type of observations for use in field campaigns and provides the capability to target observations in sensitive regions where the forecast can...

Since more than 10 years, the French fleet for airborne research in environment "SAFIRE" has been used by more than 500 researchers for various experiments. The poster will give examples of recent campaigns that have used various instrumental techniques to improve the knowledge about phenomena and their prediction.

To observe ocean and sea ice conditions in the Chukchi Sea of the Arctic Ocean, a Japanese research vessel (RV) MIRAI entered the Arctic water from 4 to 25 November 2018 through the Bearing Strait. The Arctic sea ice conditions can change over short timescales due to dynamics and thermodynamics. Leads may open and close in a very short time, and heavy pressure may build up in the compression...

Based on the viewpoint that North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) event has an intrinsic time scale about 2 weeks and can be treated as an initial-value problem, target observations for improving NAO event onset prediction are investigated by conditional nonlinear optimal perturbations method with a quasi-geostrophic model. The results show that the sensitive areas are flow-dependent, which are...

Dropsondes are small sensor packages, which are released from aircraft to provide targeted observations for pressure, temperature, humidity, and winds, for operational forecasting and research. The vast majority of dropsondes are launched into severe storms, where they provide essential observations about the state and development of the storm. These observations have a significant impact on...

The 4-year ANR-16-CE04-005 EXAEDRE (EXploiting new Atmospheric Electricity Data for Research and the Environment) project aims at providing a comprehensive description of the electrical activity in thunderstorms in the north-western Mediterranean region through innovative multi-disciplinary and state-of-the-art instrumentation and modeling tools.

The EXAEDRE airborne campaign, supported by...

ROXI (Rain Observation with an X-band Instrument), is a X-band Doppler ground-based radar (9.4 GHz) for rain observations. It was designed at LATMOS, for the study of the microphysical properties of precipitating systems, the vertical structure of clouds and precipitations by measuring the vertical reflectivity and Doppler velocity profile. The measurements extend from 100m to 12.8 km.
The...

We will present measurements of water vapour, temperature and cloud tops obtained by the GLORIA (Gimballed Limb Observer for Radiance Imaging of the Atmosphere) instrument that has been operated on the HALO (High Altitude and Long range) research aircraft during the PGS (POLSTRACC / GW-LCYCLE II / GWEX / SALSA) campaign in the Arctic during winter 2015/16.
We will show retrievals of...

The R/V Mirai conducted an Arctic cruise of the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas from 25 October to 7 December 2018. During this cruise, intensive meteorological observations around the marginal ice zone (MIZ) were made in the period of 6 to 22 November 2018. This study verified the ECMWF deterministic and ensemble forecasts against surface and radiosonde observations around the MIZ during this...