• Atmosphere
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.93-104
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• 2017

The effect of Advanced Microwave Sounding Unit-A (AMSU-A) observations on the short-range forecast in East Asia (EA) was investigated for the Northern Hemispheric (NH) summer and winter months, using the Forecast Sensitivity to Observations (FSO) method. For both periods, the contribution of radiosonde (TEMP) to the EA forecast was largest, followed by AIRCRAFT, AMSU-A, Infrared Atmospheric Sounding Interferometer (IASI), and the atmospheric motion vector of Communication, Ocean and Meteorological Satellite (COMS) or Multi-functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT). The contribution of AMSU-A sensor was largely originated from the NOAA 19, NOAA 18, and MetOp-A (NOAA 19 and 18) satellites in the NH summer (winter). The contribution of AMSU-A sensor on the MetOp-A (NOAA 18 and 19) satellites was large at 00 and 12 UTC (06 and 18 UTC) analysis times, which was associated with the scanning track of four satellites. The MetOp-A provided the radiance data over the Korea Peninsula in the morning (08:00~11:30 LST), which was important to the morning forecast. In the NH summer, the channel 5 observations on MetOp-A, NOAA 18, 19 along the seaside (along the ridge of the subtropical high) increased (decreased) the forecast error slightly (largely). In the NH winter, the channel 8 observations on NOAA 18 (NOAA 15 and MetOp-A) over the Eastern China (Tibetan Plateau) decreased (increased) the forecast error. The FSO provides useful information on the effect of each AMSU-A sensor on the EA forecasts, which leads guidance to better use of AMSU-A observations for EA regional numerical weather prediction.

• Atmosphere
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.171-186
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• 2013

Recently, the number of observations used in a data assimilation system is increasing due to the enormous amount of observations, including satellite data. However, it is not clear that all of these observations are always beneficial to the performance of the numerical weather prediction (NWP). Therefore, it is important to evaluate the effect of observations on these forecasts so that the observations can be used more usefully in NWP process. In this study, the adjoint-based Forecast Sensitivity to Observation (FSO) method with the KMA Unified Model (UM) is applied to two high-impact weather events which occurred in summer and winter in Korea in an effort to investigate the effects of observations on the forecasts of these events. The total dry energy norm is used as a response function to calculate the adjoint sensitivity. For the summer case, TEMP observations have the greatest total impact while BOGUS shows the greatest impact per observation for all of the 24-, 36-, and 48-hour forecasts. For the winter case, aircraft, ATOVS, and ESA have the greatest total impact for the 24-, 36-, and 48-hour forecasts respectively, while ESA has the greatest impact per observation. Most of the observation effects are horizontally located upwind or in the vicinity of the Korean peninsula. The fraction of beneficial observations is less than 50%, which is less than the results in previous studies. As an additional experiment, the total moist energy norm is used as a response function to measure the sensitivity of 24-hour forecast error to observations. The characteristics of the observation impact with the moist energy response function are generally similar to those with the dry energy response function. However, the ATOVS observations were found to be sensitive to the response function, showing a positive (a negative) effect on the forecast when using the dry (moist) norm for the summer case. For the winter case, the dry and moist energy norm experiments show very similar results because the adjoint of KMA UM does not calculate the specific humidity of ice properly such that the dry and moist energy norms are very similar except for the humidity in air that is very low in winter.