Trade-Offs between Measurement Accuracy and Resolutions in Configuring Phased-Array Radar Velocity Scans for Ensemble-Based Storm-Scale Data Assimilation

Abstract

Assimilation experiments are carried out with simulated radar radial-velocity observations to examine the impacts of observation accuracy and resolutions on storm-scale wind assimilation with an ensemble square root filter (EnSRF) on a storm-resolving grid (?x = 2 km). In this EnSRF, the background covariance is estimated from an ensemble of 40 imperfect-model predictions. The observation error includes both measurement error and representativeness error, and the error variance is estimated from the simulated observations against the simulated ?truth.? The results show that the analysis is not significantly improved when the measurement error is overly reduced (from 4 to 1 m s?1) and becomes smaller than the representativeness error. The analysis can be improved by properly coarsening the observation resolution (to 2 km in the radial direction) with an increase in measurement accuracy and further improved by properly enhancing the temporal resolution of radar volume scans (from every 5 to 2 or 1 min) with a decrease in measurement accuracy. There can be an optimal balance or trade-off between measurement accuracy and resolutions (in space and time) for configuring radar scans, especially phased-array radar scans, to improve storm-scale radar wind analysis and assimilation.