Start
April 30, 2021 - 3:00 pm
End
April 30, 2021 - 4:00 pm
Categories
Convective Meteorology (Mesoscale Dynamics)Convective Meteorology (Mesoscale Dynamics) Seminar
Observing System Simulation Experiments Using Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Various Configurations to Improve High-Resolution Forecasts of Convection.
Vivek Shenoy
Friday, April 30th
3:00pm
Join Google Meet:
https://meet.google.com/ksh-txvg-kni
There has been a lot of interest and development of small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAVs) to obtain atmospheric measurements for research and operations. Some have proposed a 3D Mesonet concept to add vertical profiling to mesonets such as the Oklahoma Mesonet. Observation System Simulation Experiments (OSSEs) are an effective tool to measure the impact of a proposed observing system before a complete set of observations are available, and thus are the ideal tool to study different configurations of sUAVs that may be deployed in such a 3D Mesonet.
In this OSSE study, a Nature Run is constructed using a short term 3 km and 1 km WRF nested model forecast covering Oklahoma and parts of surrounding states. Simulated sUAV profiles, as well as observations representing standard existing observations, are created from the WRF model forecast. The observations are then assimilated into the ARPS hourly for 6 hours. The case being examined is the May 20, 2013 severe weather outbreak in central and eastern Oklahoma. The sUAV system’s ability to update the background forecast for conditions on May 20, focusing on convective initiation and early storm development in the afternoon, is assessed. This represents an update to the data extraction, workflow and data assimilation strategy done in a prior study by Moore.
To examine the effect of adding simulated sUAS observations, experiments are run where there are no simulated sUAV observations compared to experiments where there are sUAV simulated observations at various max heights to 3 km. The number of simulated sUAV observations is also varied up to 108 sites.
From the forecasts of convection, we can clearly see positive impact from the addition of the sUAV observations in the convective initiation and early storm evolution. The quantitative impacts on the forecast state variables show clear positive dependence on the height of the sUAV data assimilated.