Assimilating synthetic hyperspectral sounder temperature and humidity retrievals to improve severe weather forecasts

Assimilation of hyperspectral sounder data into numerical weather prediction (NWP) models has proven vital to generating accurate model analyses of tropospheric temperature and humidity where few conventional observations exist. Applications to storm-scale models are limited since the low temporal resolution provided by polar orbiting sensors cannot adequately sample rapidly changing environments associated with high impact weather events. To address this limitation, hyperspectral sounders have been proposed for geostationary orbiting satellites, but these have yet to be built and launched in part due to much higher engineering costs and a lack of a definite requirement for the data.