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Author(s): Jiwen Fan

Advanced real-time prediction of storms with 30-second refresh

Source(s): Eos - AGU
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Forecast weather isobar night map of Asia, wind fronts and temperature vector diagram.
Vector Tradition

A new-generation weather radar and a massive supercomputing system enables forecasts of storms refreshed every 30 seconds, a significant development in severe weather prediction.

Predicting severe weather is challenging because individual clouds have a small scale of several kilometers and can rapidly develop in 5 to 10 minutes. Observing these storms by conventional radars is difficult, let alone resolving them by Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models.

Four radar reflectivity diagrams.
The figure shows radar reflectivity at the 3-kilometer height from (a-b) observations and (c-d) the NWP model prediction at 15:20:00 UTC (left) and 15:40:00 UTC (right) on August 24, 2019. The system uses observations from a new-generation weather radar called MP-PAWR located at the center of each panel (red dot) and provides 30-minute forecasts every 30 seconds. The gray shading in (a) and (b) indicates unobservable area by the radar. The gray dotted circles show the distance from the radar (20, 40, and 60 kilometers). Credit: Honda et al. [2022], Figure 11 (modified)

Honda et al. [2022] develop a complete real-time workflow of the big data assimilation (BDA) system which exploits big data from 30-second observations taken by a new-generation weather radar and from a high-resolution NWP model. Using a massive supercomputing system, the BDA system successfully performs 30-minute real-time forecasts refreshed every 30 seconds, which is 120 times more frequently than typical operational NWP systems updated every hour. The BDA system presents an important step for designing next-generation NWP systems to predict rapidly changing severe weather in a warm and humid climate.

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