Impacts of numerical weather prediction spatial resolution on an atmospheric decision aid for directed energy weapon systems

The Airborne Laser (ABL) is being developed as one element of our nation's Ballistic Missile Defense System. The ABL element office is developing an atmospheric decision aid (ADA) to diagnose and forecast the location and magnitude of optical turbulence in the upper troposphere and lower stratosphere. Development of the ADA relies on an understanding about the strengths and weaknesses of numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, plus the sensitivity of the optical turbulence algorithms to the NWP spatial and temporal resolution. This case study compared the accuracy and precision of the ADA optical turbulence algorithms to several horizontal and vertical NWP resolutions. Results indicate that for a given vertical resolution using a finer horizontal resolution does not significantly improve the accuracy of the forecast, but for a given horizontal resolution increasing the vertical resolution does improve the forecast accuracy.