Publication Date:
2014-04-10
Description:
In 2002, the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the ENVIromental SATellite (ENVISAT) that carried ten instruments to provide continuous observation of Earth's land, atmosphere, oceans and ice caps. During the satellite lifetime, the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) has routinely monitored a variety of products from many of its instruments. A subset of these data has also been assimilated in the ECMWF operational system, and two of its applications: the reanalysis and the Monitoring Atmospheric Composition and Climate systems. This paper reviews those activities and summarises the lessons learnt in monitoring and assimilating data from a research satellite within a numerical weather prediction system. The value of continuous data monitoring and the benefits that a close collaboration between data provider and data user can bring to both parties are highlighted. For observations that were assimilated, impact assessments on the ECMWF products have periodically been performed. Two cases are presented in this paper. The first one shows that the assimilation of ocean wave information can reduce the wave height model random error by up to 8% at the analysis time, with benefits at later forecasts times extending to up to 5 days in the tropics. The second example shows that the assimilation of two ENVISAT ozone products improves the agreement of the ozone analyses with independent ozone observations obtained from sondes and the Microwave Limb Sounder. Finally, the use of ENVISAT reprocessed data is presented with emphasis on the importance of data reprocessing and long-term data preservation as key activities to ensure the future usage of these datasets.
Print ISSN:
0035-9009
Electronic ISSN:
1477-870X
Topics:
Geography
,
Physics
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