Michael Bender, Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD)

GPS Slant Delay Assimilation for Convective Scale NWP

Coauthors
Klaus Stephan, Christoph Schraff, Hendrik Reich, Andreas Rhodin, Roland Potthast

Abstract:

Atmospheric delays of GPS signals provide information about the structure of the atmosphere, especially the water vapor distribution. A slant total delay (STD) assimilation operator was developed at the German Weather Service (DWD) to assimilate STD and ZTD (zenith total delay) observations into the numerical weather models. A pre-operational version of the ensemble Kalman filter for convective scale data assimilation (KENDA) was used to run the COSMO-DE local model together with the STD assimilation operator. Hourly COSMO-DE forecasts of 40 ensemble members were processed by the local ensemble transform Kalman filter (LETKF) to obtain the analyses and 24-hour forecasts were started every 6 hours. First STD assimilation experiments show a positive impact and some initial results will be presented.

File available here