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Quality and Control of Water Vapor WindsWater vapor imagery from the geostationary satellites such as GOES, Meteosat, and GMS provides synoptic views of dynamical events on a continual basis. Because the imagery represents a non-linear combination of mid- and upper-tropospheric thermodynamic parameters (three-dimensional variations in temperature and humidity), video loops of these image products provide enlightening views of regional flow fields, the movement of tropical and extratropical storm systems, the transfer of moisture between hemispheres and from the tropics to the mid- latitudes, and the dominance of high pressure systems over particular regions of the Earth. Despite the obvious larger scale features, the water vapor imagery contains significant image variability down to the single 8 km GOES pixel. These features can be quantitatively identified and tracked from one time to the next using various image processing techniques. Merrill et al. (1991), Hayden and Schmidt (1992), and Laurent (1993) have documented the operational procedures and capabilities of NOAA and ESOC to produce cloud and water vapor winds. These techniques employ standard correlation and template matching approaches to wind tracking and use qualitative and quantitative procedures to eliminate bad wind vectors from the wind data set. Techniques have also been developed to improve the quality of the operational winds though robust editing procedures (Hayden and Veldon 1991). These quality and control approaches have limitations, are often subjective, and constrain wind variability to be consistent with model derived wind fields. This paper describes research focused on the refinement of objective quality and control parameters for water vapor wind vector data sets. New quality and control measures are developed and employed to provide a more robust wind data set for climate analysis, data assimilation studies, as well as operational weather forecasting. The parameters are applicable to cloud-tracked winds as well with minor modifications. The improvement in winds through use of these new quality and control parameters is measured without the use of rawinsonde or modeled wind field data and compared with other approaches.
Document ID
19970023397
Acquisition Source
Marshall Space Flight Center
Document Type
Reprint (Version printed in journal)
Authors
Jedlovec, Gary J.
(NASA Marshall Space Flight Center Huntsville, AL United States)
Atkinson, Robert J.
(Lockheed Martin Corp. Huntsville, AL United States)
Date Acquired
September 6, 2013
Publication Date
January 1, 1996
Publication Information
Publication: Eighth Conference on Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography
Publisher: American Meteorological Society
Subject Category
Meteorology And Climatology
Report/Patent Number
NASA-TM-112796
NAS 1.15:112796
Meeting Information
Meeting: Satellite Meteorology and Oceanography
Location: Atlanta, GA
Country: United States
Start Date: January 28, 1996
End Date: February 2, 1996
Accession Number
97N23739
Distribution Limits
Public
Copyright
Work of the US Gov. Public Use Permitted.
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