A Study of Simultaneous Assimilation of Coastal Ground‐Based and Airborne Radar Observations on the Prediction of Harvey (2017) With the Hourly 3DEnVar System for HWRF

Abstract

While landfalling hurricanes are notorious for their catastrophic impacts on coastal regions, accurate predictions remain a big challenge as always. One of the major difficulties for hurricane predictions, especially intensity predictions, comes from the need for more high-density and high-quality inner-core observations to provide accurate initial conditions for numerical models.One common source of inner core observations is instruments used during airborne field campaigns. An example is the tail Doppler radar (TDR) observations onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) WP-3D aircraft (Rogers et al., 2012). This sampling of TC inner-core regions using the X-band (3 cm wavelength) TDR can be traced back to the 1980s (Jorgensen, 1984;Marks & Houze, 1984). However, the assimilation of TDR observations only showed promising results in improving the hurricane predictions in the recent decade after high-resolution (e.g., convection-permitting) numerical models with ensemble-based data assimilation (DA) capabilities emerged (