Accessibility navigation


Diagnosing observation error correlations for Doppler radar radial winds in the Met Office UKV model using observation-minus-background and observation-minus-analysis statistics

Waller, J. A., Simonin, D., Dance, S. L. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1690-3338, Nichols, N. K. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1133-5220 and Ballard, S. P. (2016) Diagnosing observation error correlations for Doppler radar radial winds in the Met Office UKV model using observation-minus-background and observation-minus-analysis statistics. Monthly Weather Review, 144 (10). pp. 3533-3551. ISSN 0027-0644

[img]
Preview
Text (Open Access) - Published Version
· Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.
· Please see our End User Agreement before downloading.

1MB
[img]
Preview
Text - Accepted Version
· Please see our End User Agreement before downloading.

309kB

It is advisable to refer to the publisher's version if you intend to cite from this work. See Guidance on citing.

To link to this item DOI: 10.1175/MWR-D-15-0340.1

Abstract/Summary

With the development of convection-permitting numerical weather prediction the efficient use of high-resolution observations in data assimilation is becoming increasingly important. The operational assimilation of these observations, such as Doppler radar radial winds (DRWs), is now common, though to avoid violating the assumption of uncorrelated observation errors the observation density is severely reduced. To improve the quantity of observations used and the impact that they have on the forecast requires the introduction of the full, potentially correlated, error statistics. In this work, observation error statistics are calculated for the DRWs that are assimilated into the Met Office high-resolution UK model using a diagnostic that makes use of statistical averages of observation-minus-background and observation-minus-analysis residuals. This is the first in-depth study using the diagnostic to estimate both horizontal and along-beam observation error statistics. The new results obtained show that the DRW error standard deviations are similar to those used operationally and increase as the observation height increases. Surprisingly the estimated observation error correlation length-scales are longer than the operational thinning distance. They are dependent both on the height of the observation and on the distance of the observation away from the radar. Further tests show that the long correlations cannot be attributed to the background error covariance matrix used in the assimilation, although they are, in part, a result of using superobservations and a simplified observation operator. The inclusion of correlated error statistics in the assimilation allows less thinning of the data and hence better use of the high-resolution observations.

Item Type:Article
Refereed:Yes
Divisions:Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Science > School of Mathematical, Physical and Computational Sciences > Department of Meteorology
ID Code:65806
Publisher:American Meteorological Society

Downloads

Downloads per month over past year

University Staff: Request a correction | Centaur Editors: Update this record

Page navigation