Development of an Observation Processing Package for Data Assimilation in KIAPS

A new observation processing system, the Korea Institute of Atmospheric Prediction Systems (KIAPS) Package for Observation Processing (KPOP), has been developed to provide optimal observation datasets to the data assimilation (DA) system for the Korean Integrated Model, KIM. This paper presents the KPOP’s conceptual design, how the principal modules have been developed, and some of their preliminary results. Currently, the KPOP is capable of processing almost all observation types used by the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) and some new observation types that have a positive impact in other operational centers. We have developed an adaptive bias correction (BC) method that only uses the background of the analysis time and selects the best observations through the consecutive iteration of BC and quality control (QC); it has been verified that this method will be the best suited for the KIAPS DA system until the development of variational BC (VarBC) has been completed. The requirement of considering the radiosonde balloon drift in the DA according to the increase of spatial resolution of the NWP model was accounted for using a balloon drift estimation method that considers the pressure difference and wind speed; thus the distance error was less than 1% in the sample test. Some kind of widely used methods were tested for height adjustment of the SURFACE observation, and a new method for temperature adjustment was outlined that used the correlation between temperature and relative humidity. In addition, three types of map projection were compared: the cubed-sphere (CS), equidistance (ED), and equirectangular (ER) projection for thinning. Data denial experiments were conducted to investigate how the KPOP affected the quality of the analysis fields in the three-dimensional variational data assimilation system (3D-Var). Qualified observations produced by the KPOP had a positive impact by reducing the analysis error.