Assimilation of GOES-16 satellite derived winds into the warn-on-forecast system

Abstract

The Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI) onboard the GOES-R series of geostationary satellites provides an opportunity to generate high-resolution satellite derived wind vectors over continental United States not possible from previous satellites. This study investigates the quality and the impact of assimilating satellite-derived winds (or Atmospheric Motion Vectors, AMVs) from the GOES-16 geostationary satellite on high-impact weather forecasts using the NOAA's ensemble based Warn-on-Forecast System (WoFS). The WoFS runs at convection allowing scales (~3 km) with a 15-min cycling frequency assimilating all available observations including conventional, radar and GOES-16 cloud water path retrievals over a limited area domain. Four severe weather events during 2018 are considered in this study to assess the potential impacts of assimilating GOES-16 AMVs into the WoFS. A total of eight experiments performed, four that assimilate AMV data and the remaining four do not with all including conventional, radar, and other satellite data. This research represents the first step to assimilated high-resolution satellite derived winds into the convective-allowing ensemble data assimilation system. The results show that the overall impact of assimilation of AMVs is small, but positive for probabilistic forecasts of reflectivity objects.