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Impact of Lightning Data Assimilation on the Short-Term Precipitation Forecast over the Central Mediterranean Sea
- Source :
- Remote Sensing; Volume 13; Issue 4; Pages: 682, Remote Sensing, Vol 13, Iss 682, p 682 (2021)
- Publication Year :
- 2021
- Publisher :
- Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2021.
-
Abstract
- Lightning data assimilation (LDA) is a powerful tool to improve the weather forecast of convective events and has been widely applied with this purpose in the past two decades. Most of these applications refer to events hitting coastal and land areas, where people live. However, a weather forecast over the sea has many important practical applications, and this paper focuses on the impact of LDA on the precipitation forecast over the central Mediterranean Sea around Italy. The 3 h rapid update cycle (RUC) configuration of the weather research and forecasting (WRF) model) has been used to simulate the whole month of November 2019. Two sets of forecasts have been considered: CTRL, without lightning data assimilation, and LIGHT, which assimilates data from the LIghtning detection NETwork (LINET). The 3 h precipitation forecast has been compared with observations of the Integrated Multi-satellitE Retrievals for Global Precipitation Mission (GPM) (IMERG) dataset and with rain gauge observations recorded in six small Italian islands. The comparison of CTRL and LIGHT precipitation forecasts with the IMERG dataset shows a positive impact of LDA. The correlation between predicted and observed precipitation improves over wide areas of the Ionian and Adriatic Seas when LDA is applied. Specifically, the correlation coefficient for the whole domain increases from 0.59 to 0.67, and the anomaly correlation (AC) improves by 5% over land and by 8% over the sea when lightning is assimilated. The impact of LDA on the 3 h precipitation forecast over six small islands is also positive. LDA improves the forecast by both decreasing the false alarms and increasing the hits of the precipitation forecast, although with variability among the islands. The case study of 12 November 2019 (time interval 00–03 UTC) has been used to show how important the impact of LDA can be in practice. In particular, the shifting of the main precipitation pattern from land to the sea caused by LDA gives a much better representation of the precipitation field observed by the IMERG precipitation product.
- Subjects :
- Rapid update cycle
010504 meteorology & atmospheric sciences
Science
WRF
0208 environmental biotechnology
lightning data assimilation (LDA)
IMERG
very short-term precipitation forecast
LINET
02 engineering and technology
01 natural sciences
law.invention
Data assimilation
Mediterranean sea
law
Precipitation
0105 earth and related environmental sciences
Lightning detection
Rain gauge
020801 environmental engineering
Weather Research and Forecasting Model
Climatology
Quantitative precipitation forecast
General Earth and Planetary Sciences
Environmental science
Subjects
Details
- Language :
- English
- ISSN :
- 20724292
- Database :
- OpenAIRE
- Journal :
- Remote Sensing; Volume 13; Issue 4; Pages: 682
- Accession number :
- edsair.doi.dedup.....e6bfe6d0fa580d6bb7310ef7a16eeea7
- Full Text :
- https://doi.org/10.3390/rs13040682