P11     NOAA’s Commercial Weather Data Project: Evaluating the impact of assimilating additional GNSS-RO data into operational forecast models.

Newman, Kathryn, Chunhua Zhou, Julia Pearson, National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and Developmental Testbed Center (DTC), Hui Shao, Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA), and Louisa Nance, NCAR and DTC

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is conducting a demonstration project to investigate the viability of assimilating commercially-provided Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) Radio Occultation (RO) data and products into meteorological models and determine their impact on weather forecasts. The Developmental Testbed Center (DTC) is working with partners within UCAR Community Programs (UCP) Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate (COSMIC) and the Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) to provide an unbiased evaluation of the quality of commercially-provided GNSS-RO data and its impact on the skill of NOAA’s weather forecast models. This presentation will focus on the evaluation conducted by NCAR’s Research Applications Laboratory (RAL) under the DTC. Due to limited availability of good quality and quantity of commercially-provided RO data during the initial year, effort to stand up the evaluation systems and demonstrate the methodology to be used on the commercially-provided data during the subsequent year was conducted using Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite-5 (KOMPSat-5) Global Positioning System (GPS)-RO data. Estimates of observation errors using both co-located radiosonde observations as well as comparisons with global forecast model data will be shown, using COSMIC GPS-RO data as a benchmark. Additionally, the impact of assimilating KOMPSat-5 for regional forecast applications will be demonstrated using NOAA’s hourly-updated modeling system, Rapid Refresh (RAP), for a one month testing period.