A Comparison of the Impacts of Radiosonde and AMSU Radiance Observations in GSI Based 3DEnsVar and 3DVar Data Assimilation Systems for NCEP GFS Advances in Meteorology

The impact of observations can be dependent on many factors in a data assimilation (DA) system including data quality control, preprocessing, skill of the model, and the DA algorithm. The present study focuses on comparing the impacts of observations assimilated by two different DA algorithms. A three-dimensional ensemble-variational (3DEnsVar) hybrid data assimilation system was recently developed based on the Gridpoint Statistical Interpolation (GSI) data assimilation system and was implemented operationally for the National Center for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Global Forecast System (GFS). One question to address is, how the impacts of observations on GFS forecasts differ when assimilated by the traditional GSI-three dimensional variational (3DVar) and the new 3DEnsVar. Experiments were conducted over a 6-week period during Northern Hemisphere winter season at a reduced resolution. For both the control and data denial experiments, the forecasts produced by 3DEnsVar were more accurate than GSI3DVar experiments. The results suggested that the observations were better and more effectively exploited to increment the background forecast in 3DEnsVar. On the other hand, in GSI3DVar, where the observation will be making mostly local, isotropic increments without proper flow dependent extrapolation is more sensitive to the number and types observations assimilated. Grant no. NA08OAR4320904 Grant no. NA12NWS4680012