Validation of INSAT-3D atmospheric motion vectors for monsoon 2015

Abstract

Atmospheric Motion Vector (AMV) over Indian Ocean and surrounding region is one of the most important sources of tropospheric wind information assimilated in numerical weather prediction (NWP) system. Earlier studies showed that the quality of Indian geo-stationary satellite Kalpana-1 AMVs was not comparable to that of other geostationary satellites over this region and hence not used in NWP system. Indian satellite INSAT-3D was successfully launched on July 26, 2013 with upgraded imaging system as compared to that of previous Indian satellite Kalpana-1. INSAT-3D has middle infrared band (3.80 - 4.00 μm) which is capable of night time pictures of low clouds and fog. Three consecutive images of 30-minutes interval are used to derive the AMVs. New height assignment scheme (using NWP first guess and replacing old empirical GA method) along with modified quality control scheme were implemented for deriving INSAT-3D AMVs. In this paper an attempt has been made to validate these AMVs against in-situ observations as well as against NCMRWF's NWP first guess for monsoon 2015. AMVs are subdivided into three different pressure levels in the vertical viz. low (1000 – 700 hPa), middle (700 – 400 hPa) and high (400 – 100 hPa) for validation purpose. Several statistics viz. normalized root mean square vector difference; biases etc. have been computed over different latitudinal belt. Result shows that the general mean monsoon circulations along with all the transient monsoon systems are well captured by INSAT-3D AMVs, as well as the error statistics viz., RMSE etc of INSAT-3D AMVs is now comparable to other geostationary satellites.