Extending the Analog Ensemble Method for Satellite Observations

The Army needs probabilistic weather forecasts for effective mission planning and preparation. Current DoD weather capabilities use deterministic numerical weather prediction (NWP) models to forecast weather. This means the model may not predict rain when there’s a 30% chance of rain, for example. The most common variant of the Analog Ensemble (AnEn) method can provide forecast probabilities using historic NWP model runs and in-situ observations. However, for remote or denied regions, in-situ observations are not available, and satellite observations need to be used instead. As such, the AnEn method must be adapted to use satellite observations. Creare and our Pennsylvania State University collaborators propose to develop AnEn-Sat, a software framework for producing probabilistic weather forecasts from deterministic NWP model runs and satellite observations.