Assimilating the global satellite mapping of precipitation data with the Nonhydrostatic Icosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM)

This study aims to propose two new approaches to improve precipitation forecasts from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models through effective data assimilation of satellite-derived precipitation. The assimilation of precipitation data is known to be very difficult mainly because of highly non-Gaussian statistics of precipitation variables. Following Lien et al., this study addresses the non-Gaussianity issue by applying the Gaussian transformation (GT) based on the empirical cumulative distribution function (CDF) of precipitation. We propose a method that constructs the CDF with only recent 1 month samples, without using a long period of samples needed previously. We also propose a method to use the inverse GT, with which we can obtain realistic precipitation fields from biased NWP model outputs. We assimilate the Japan Aerospace eXploration Agency's Global Satellite Mapping of Precipitation (GSMaP) data into the Nonhydrostatic Icosahedral Atmospheric Model (NICAM) at 112 km horizontal resolution. Assimilating the GSMaP data results in improved weather forecasts compared to the control experiment assimilating only rawinsonde data. We find that horizontal observation thinning is necessary, probably due to the horizontal observation-error correlations in the GSMaP data. We also obtained precipitation fields similar to GSMaP from the NICAM precipitation forecasts by using the inverse GT, leading to an improved precipitation forecast.