The alternative of CubeSat-based advanced infrared and microwave sounders for high impact weather forecasting

Abstract

The advanced infrared (IR) and microwave (MW) sounding systems have been providing atmospheric sounding information critical for nowcasting and improving weather forecasts through data assimilation in numerical weather prediction. In recent years, advanced IR and MW sounder systems are being proposed to be onboard CubeSats that are much more cost efficient than traditional satellite systems. An impact study using a regional Observing System Simulation Experiment on a local severe storm (LSS) was carried out to evaluate the alternative of using advanced MW and IR sounders for high-impact weather forecasting in mitigating the potential data gap of the Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS) and the Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS) on the Suomi-NPP (SNPP) or Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS). It was found that either MicroMAS-2 or the CubeSat Infrared Atmospheric Sounder (CIRAS) on a single CubeSat was able to provide a positive impact on the LSS forecast, and more CubeSats with increased data coverage yielded larger positive impacts. MicroMAS-2 has the potential to mitigate the loss of ATMS, and CIRAS the loss of CrIS, on SNPP or JPSS, especially when multiple CubeSats are launched. There are several approximations and limitations to the present study, but these represent efficiencies appropriate to the principal goal of the studygauging the relative values of these sensors.

Homogenized Water Vapor Absorption Band Radiances From International Geostationary Satellites

“…Operational SRFs are used to generate radiances for each of the sensors from the simulated IASI/Metop‐A radiances. Gaussian distributed random numbers based on each sensor's in‐orbit noise equivalent delta temperature, or NEdT, are generated to simulate observation noise (Li et al, , ). Linear regression coefficients are generated for each of the 10 non‐zero LZA classes.…”

“…The SeeBor database (Seemann et al, 2008) (Li et al, 2018(Li et al, , 2019. Linear regression coefficients are generated for each of the 10 non-zero LZA classes.…”

Satellite All-sky Infrared Radiance Assimilation: Recent Progress and Future Perspectives

“…It will also be necessary to develop the schemes and approaches to support the assimilation of IR observations under all-sky conditions from CubeSats and other non-traditional observing platforms that contain complex viewing geometries (Li et al, 2019) and may have shorter lifetimes (i.e., time to characterize the errors). In addition, sophisticated observation error models and bias correction methods will need to be developed to harness the full potential of all-sky IR radiances under different weather and surface situations.…”

The Impact of Low Latency Satellite Sounder Observations on Local Severe Storm Forecasts in Regional NWP

“…Table 5 shows the normalized RMSE using the same method for LSS Case II. The final nominalized RMSE was calculated using a weighted average based on the approach used in the geostationary advanced IR sounder [25] and the CubeSat sounder [26] impact studies:…”