Overview

The DLR Institut für Physik der Atmosphäre is planning to operate the Falcon 20 aircraft from an aircraft base on Japan during the THORPEX Pacific Asian Regional Campaign (T-PARC). The main objectives of the aircraft deployment are airborne lidar and dropsonde observations of atmospheric wind, temperature and water vapour for improved weather forecasts, in particular during high-impact weather events. The observations will be used by Meteorological Services around the world to improve the representation of the initial state in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models.

The campaign is a multi-national effort to improve the predictive skills of NWP models and to increase our understanding of physical processes leading to high-impact weather events. The observations are planned for the time period 25 August to 4 October 2008. The main focus will be the prediction of tropical cyclones, the extra-tropical transition of tropical cyclones and related downstream impact.

The first assimilation of airborne Doppler lidar observations taken during the Atlantic THORPEX Regional Campaign (A-TReC) demonstrated that significant forecast improvements can be reached assimilating such observations in NWP models. T-PARC is expected to provide further insights into the value of lidars fort he future global observing system. The campaign will provide an unprecedented data set of conventional and remote sensing observations taken by four research aircraft, driftsondes released from Hawaii, additional radiosondes and ground-based observations. This data set will be used to investigate (1) the benefit of additional observations, (2) their optimal location and concepts of observation targeting, (3) the optimal use of observations in NWP models, and (4) the value of novel observing systems.

DLR is closely collaborating with many partners from North America, Europe and Asia to reach the project goals. These partners include the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe and the University Karlsruhe (Germany), the Japanese Meteorological Agency (JMA, Japan), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR, USA) the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS, USA), the Meteorological Research Center (METRI, Korea) and Environment Canada. The operations are funded through a share between North American, European and Asian funding agencies.