Assimilating microwave cloudy observations into NASA GEOS model using a novel Bayesian Monte Carlo technique
Despite the importance of clouds and their influence on atmospheric water and energy balance, Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) centers systematically exclude cloud information from the assimilation process and only assimilate clear-sky radiances (Janiskov´a et al. 2012). In order to ensure that only clear sky radiances are assimilated, strict cloud detection thresholds are applied before radiances are fed into data assimilation (DA) systems. This process not only excludes a large portion of satellite radiances, but causes loss of information in the regions that are of high interest to meteorologists and are most challenging for weather forecasts (Errico et al. 2007; Haddad et al. 2015). Although, in recent years there has been great advances in the operational weather forecasting, the prediction of tropical cyclones (TC), especially the intensity of TCs, remains challenging. According to Aksoy et al. (2013), in addition to the model deficiencies, another important factor that contributes to this challenge includes lack of observations in the peripheral environment (rain- bands) of TCs mainly because of the selective assimilation of existing observations. Satellite observations provide more than 90 % of the input data for the initialization of NWP models but more than 75 % of satellite observations are discarded due to the cloud contamination as well as land, snow, and ice emissivity issues (Bauer et al. 2010).