Abstract:

Data assimilation is the process of statistically combining the latest observations with a model background to obtain the best estimate of the atmosphere in a region of interest and at a specified time. In and around the inner-core region of a tropical cyclone, this becomes especially challenging due to several factors. First, there exist multiple scales of motion including turbulence, convection, and vortex-scale dynamics that are equally important in the evolution of a vortex. To compound this theoretical challenge, atmospheric prediction models have large errors at these scales due to the difficulty to explicitly resolve these processes at a sufficiently high spatial and temporal resolution without becoming exceedingly expensive to simulate numerically. Finally, large gaps of observing capabilities exist due to the difficulty to collect direct or indirect observations in this region. This talk will provide an overview of the ongoing tropical cyclone data assimilation research activities at NOAA/AOML Hurricane Research Division and University of Miami/CIMAS and discuss the range of activities that span the full life cycle of data assimilation from data collection to applications in operational numerical models.