Abstract
Small scale distributions of water vapor that express convection cells are needed to improve numerical forecasts of heavy rainfall . In this study, temporal variations of refractivity (TVR ), which include information of small scale water vapor variations, were obtained from the phase data of radio waves of the JMA’s operational Doppler radar . The TVR distributions on August 4th 2008 showed that the increased and decreased regions of TVR moved smoothly, corresponding to the movements of sea breeze fronts. These smooth variations indicated that the observed TVR were caused by the atmosphere. The TVR obtained by the operational Doppler radar was assimilated by a nested Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter system. The reproduced distributions indicated that the data assimilation of TVR made the rainfall distributions closer to the observed ones by modifying water vapor distributions. This result shows that TVR has the potential to improve rainfall forecasts.
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