A radar reflectivity operator with ice-phase hydrometeors for variational data assimilation (version 1.0) and its evaluation with real radar data

RadarVar can analyze both rainwater and ice-phase species (snow and graupel) by directly assimilating radar reflectivity observations. The results of three-dimensional variational (3D-Var) DA experiments with a 3 km grid mesh setting of theWeather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model showed that RadarVar was effective at producing an analysis of reflectivity pattern and intensity similar to the observed data.

Two to three outer loops with 50-100 iterations in each loop were needed to obtain a converged 3-D analysis of reflectivity, rainwater, snow, and graupel, including the melting layers with mixed-phase hydrometeors. It is shown that the deficiencies in the analysis using this operator, caused by the poor quality of the background fields and the use of the static background error covariance, can be partially resolved by using radar-retrieved hydrometeors in a preprocessing step and tuning the spatial correlation length scales of the background errors.