Impact Study of Increased Radio Occultation Observations during the ROMEX Period Using JEDI and the GFS Atmospheric Model

Abstract

The international collaborative Radio Occultation Modeling EXperiment (ROMEX) project marks the first time using a large volume of real data to assess the impact of increased Global Navigation Satellite System radio occultation (GNSS-RO) observations beyond current operational levels, moving past previous theoretical simulation-based studies. The ROMEX project enabled the use of approximately 35 000 daily RO profiles - nearly triple the number typically available to operational centers, which is about 8000 to 12 000 per day. This study investigates the impact of increased RO profiles on numerical weather prediction (NWP) with the Joint Effort for Data assimilation Integration (JEDI) and the global forecast system (GFS), as part of the ROMEX effort. A series of experiments were conducted assimilating varying amounts of RO data along with a common set of other key observations. The results confirm that assimilating additional RO data further improves forecasts across all major meteorological fields, including temperature, humidity, geopotential height, and wind speed, for most of vertical levels. These improvements are significantly evident in verification against both critical observations and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) analyses, with beneficial impacts lasting up to 5 d. Conversely, withholding RO data resulted in forecast degradations. The results also suggest that forecast improvements scale approximately logarithmically with the number of assimilated profiles, and no evidence of saturation was observed. Biases in the forecast of temperature and geopotential height over the lower stratosphere are discussed, and they are consistent with findings from other studies in the ROMEX community.