Assimilation of radar radial winds in the HIRLAM 3D-var

During the last decade several attempts of assimilating radar wind data into atmospheric models have been reported by various research groups. Some of these are briefly reviewed here. A three-dimensional variational data assimilation (3D-Var) scheme for the High Resolution Limited Area Model (HIRLAM) forecasting system has been developed and prepared for assimilation of low elevation angle radar radial wind superobservations. The HIRLAM 3D-Var is based on a minimization of a cost function that consists of one term measuring the distance between the resulting analysis and a background field, which is a short-range forecast, and another term measuring the distance between the analysis and the observations. The development required for assimilating the radial wind data includes software for generating and managing the superobservations from polar volume data, a quality control algorithm and an observation operator for providing the model counterpart of the observation. The functionality of the components have been evaluated through assimilation experiments using data from Finnish and Swedish radars and further studies are underway.