RESEARCH ARTICLE


Assimilation of GPS Radio Occultation Data for Tropical Cyclogenesis: A Case Study in the Eastern Atlantic



Keren Rosado1, *, Sen Chiao2
1 Department of Atmospheric Science, Howard University, Washington, DC, USA
2 Department of Meteorology and Climate Science, San Jose State University, San Jose CA, USA

Article Information


Identifiers and Pagination:

Year: 2018
Volume: 12
First Page: 33
Last Page: 47
Publisher Id: TOASCJ-12-33
DOI: 10.2174/1874282301812010033

Article History:

Received Date: 13/12/2017
Revision Received Date: 1/4/2018
Acceptance Date: 13/4/2018
Electronic publication date: 30/04/2018
Collection year: 2018

© 2018 Rosado and Chiao.

open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Department of Atmospheric Science, Howard University, NOAA/ESRL 325 Broadway Boulder, CO 80305-3337, Washington, DC, USA; Tel: (303) 497-5907; E-mail: keren.rosado@howard.edu


Abstract

Aim:

This study aimed to investigate the impact of using Global Positioning System Radio Occultation (GPS RO) sounding data (i.e., Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere, and Climate; COSMIC) for Tropical Cyclogenesis (TC-genesis) research.

Methods:

The Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF-ARW) model and the WRF data assimilation system (i.e., WRF 3DVAR) were employed to simulate Tropical Depression- 8 (TD8) 2006. A noteworthy feature about TD8-genesis was that Saharan dust outbreak was also observed during this period, which made this event more sophisticated. The time frame to be focused on was from 1200 UTC September 09 to 1200 UTC September 12, 2006. The level 2 wetPrf COSMIC data was adopted in this research. A 72-hour integration wasperformed with initial and time-dependent lateral boundary conditions derived from the NCEP final analysis data (FNL). A 2-domain nested simulation was configured with 30 km, and10 km horizontal resolutions, respectively.

Results:

Simulation results from all the experiments performed with different RO soundings combination showed that the RO sounding 8 has the greatest significant impact on TD8 simulation.

Conclusion:

Elevation, time, and location are the parameters that made RO sounding 8 the most treasured sounding to analyze TD8.

Keywords: Tropical Cyclogenesis Research, TD8-genesis, Saharan dust outbreak, RO soundings, TD8 stimulation, COSMIC.