Presenting Author: Dr. Ralph Milliff

Written (33) and site-visit (16) surveys of the National Weather Service, Weather Forecast Offices (WFO) of the coastal United States were conducted to document the utility of surface vector wind data from QuikSCAT in WFO operations. Survey results demonstrate that: a) QuikSCAT data supplement primary datasets (e.g. IR imagery) and numerical weather prediction fields in the manual production of local weather forecasts and warnings; b) operational utility of QuikSCAT data would be enhanced by surface vector wind retrievals at finer temporal resolution, closer to the coast; and c) rain flags in the near-real time QuikSCAT dataset have little impact on WFO operations. In an attempt to address the enhancement issues raised in the surveys, QuikSCAT data were ingested into the Local Area Prediction System (LAPS) for test cases from the Eureka, CA WFO (EKA). In at least one test case, QuikSCAT-LAPS raised winds in the EKA marine zone to increase warning levels vs. LAPS without QuikSCAT. Experiments are currently in progress to examine QuikSCAT impacts in local area mesoscale models (MM5 and WRF) for the EKA WFO using simple nudging procedures for short-term forecast runs.

2024 International OVWST Meeting May 29 - 31 Salt Lake City, Utah, USA

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