The variational assimilation experiment of GPS bending angle

More and more new types of observational data provide many new opportunities for improving numerical weather forecasts. Among these, the GPS (Global Positioning System) bending angle is undoubtedly very important. There are many advantages of the GPS bending angle, such as high resolution, availability in all weather conditions, and global data coverage. Thus it is very valuable to assimilate GPS bending angle data into numerical weather models. This paper introduces how to obtain and assimilate the GPS bending angle. There are two methods of assimilation: the indirect method and direct method, and they are both introduced in this paper. During the minimizing process of variational assimilation, calculation efficiency is very important and the optimal step size greatly influences the algorithm efficiency. Based on the characteristics of the minimizing algorithm, we obtain an adaptive method for calculating the optimizing step suitable for all kinds of minimization algorithms through mathematical deduction. Finally, a numerical variational assimilation experiment is performed using the GPS bending angle data of 11 October 1995. The numerical results indicate the validity of the variational assimilation method and the adaptive method introduced here.