Towards the next generation of hazardous weather prediction: observation uncertainty and data assimilation

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• Sarah Dance, University of Reading, UK
• Wednesday 11 October 2023, 16:00-17:00
• Physics West, W117.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Yeshpal Singh.

Weather forecasts play a vital part in our lives, with major impacts on society and the economy. Forecasts are initialised by combining recent observations of the weather with previous computational predictions using a constrained optimization process, known as data assimilation. Convection-permitting (km-scale) data assimilation systems have been used in research and operational numerical weather prediction for more than fifteen years. These systems have been proven to provide improved short-term (0-36 hour) forecasts, particularly for hazardous weather such as intense storms and fog. However, there are still many challenges to be addressed in these high-resolution systems. We will briefly review these broad challenges including multiscaling, spin-up, nonlinearity and model error. For the main focus of the presentation, we will consider the challenge of providing detailed observation information on appropriate scales in the analysis from a range of heterogeneous sources including remote sensing, aircraft and surface observations from conventional and unconventional sources. We will discuss the computational challenges of using many billions of observations in a near-real time operational weather forecasting system and give some new results that have potential for large speed up.

This talk is part of the Physics and Astronomy Colloquia series.

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• Bham Talks
• Physics West, W117
• Physics and Astronomy Colloquia
• What's on in Physics?

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