An investigation of Colorado front range winter storms using a nonhydrostatic mesoscale numerical model designed for operational use

State-of-the-art data sources such as Doppler radar, automated surface observations, wind profiler, digital satellite and aircraft reports are providing a vastly improved view of the atmosphere to the operational meteorological community. Using these data sources, three-dimensional gridded data sets can be assembled in real-time with sufficient spatial and temporal resolutions to diagnose the structure and evolution of mesoscale systems. A data assimilation system of this type, called the Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS) (McGinley 1989, McGinley et al. 1991), is being developed at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric System’s Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL). FSL ingests real-time meteorological data that will be representative of data sets available to the operational community by the mid-1990s. LAPS integrates all available data to generate real-time, high-resolution (10 km horizontal grid interval), three-dimensional analyses of meteorological state variables, which can then be used in computer workstation product format or as input to appropriate algorithms and numerical forecast models.