This project will continue past work to integrate data collected from multiple measurement platforms during field programs such as the Department of Energy's Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) program and the Tropical Ocean Global Atmosphere - Coupled Ocean-Atmosphere Response Experiment (TOGA-COARE), merging them into physically-consistent data sets and rendering them suitable for model applications. Refinements will be made to an existing variational analysis algorithm used to align the variables such as flow velocities, water vapor and energy fluxes, constraining them so that they conform to known physical relationships (e.g., conservation of column-integrated budgets of energy, and momentum). The primary foci in the current project are the re-processing of TOGA-COARE data, the International H2O Project (IHOP) data using corrected sounding data while adding surface and top-of-the-atmosphere flux data, as well as data from the Large-scale Biosphere-Atmosphere (LBA) field campaign conducted in 1999. Subsets of these data will be selected and used to address specific global climate model parameterization issues.
The research will facilitate a synergistic use of observational data sets and models, improving parameterizations for a number of such models employed by the weather prediction/climate communities.
