Data Assimilation Using WRFDA Over the Terminal Area of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract The impact of the data assimilation process of air temperature and relative humidity from surface meteorological stations and sounding at airports in the terminal area of Rio de Janeiro is evaluated using the Weather Research and Forecast Data Assimilation system. Synthetic data of temperature, relative humidity and wind are generated in the locations of airport sensors by applying a white-noise perturbation in the forecast data. Results show a positive overall impact of the assimilation process with the removal of part of the noise in the observation data but keeping the effect of local conditions in the later timesteps of the simulation. In addition, with the assimilation process there is a global reduction of the error between the analysis data and the observation data. In the future, a neural network will be trained to emulate the data assimilation process to speed-up the assimilation process in the WRF model.