Introduction of the NIMS/KMA Atmospheric Research Aircraft Observation and its Model ImpactTae-Young Goo, Sueng-Pil Jung, Seung-Beom HanNational Institute of Meteorological Sciences of Korea Meteorological Administration, Korea |
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The National Institute of Meteorological Sciences (NIMS) of the Korea?Meteorological Administration (KMA) has operated a research aircraft since 2018. The aircraft is called NARA that stands for NIMS/KMA Atmospheric Research Aircraft. The NARA can fly up to about 10 km for 5 hours approximately and is able to cover all areas in Korea. Annual flight times and days are about 400 hours and 100~120 days, respectively. From 2018 to 2024, there were 346 flights for Severe Weather (SW) monitoring including typhoon, which is 44.8% of all flights. NARA has 27 types of observational instruments and devices. In particular, dropsonde, Aircraft Integrated Meteorological Measurement System (AIMMS), Stepped Frequency Microwave Radiometer (SFMR) and Ka-band Probe Radar (KPR) play a key role for SW mission. Ensemble forecast sensitivity to observation shows that aircraft observations give better impact than those from research vessel and car. In particular, significantly positive impact was found in terms of humidity and wind. In addition, a case study on the improvement of model performance due to data assimilation of dropsonde and AIMSS has been carried out. Improvement rates of RMSE between control forcast and assimilated forecast against ground-based observations was 11.3% for dropsonde and 14.4% for AIMSS, respectively." |