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Using the NWC SAF products over South Africa and southern Africa to enhance nowcasting capabilities in data sparse regions. E de Coning, Morne Gijben, Louis van Hemert, Bathobile Maseko South African Weather Service. Content. Background CRR examples for SA and SADC
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Using the NWC SAF products over South Africa and southern Africa to enhance nowcasting capabilities in data sparse regions E de Coning, Morne Gijben, Louis van Hemert, Bathobile Maseko South African Weather Service
Content • Background • CRR examples for SA and SADC • CRR vs Hydroestimator vs rain gauge data for Oct-Dec 2014 • RDT examples for SA and SADC • RDT validated against lightning data for Dec ’14 and Jan ‘15 • Conclusions and future work
Background Nowcasting is needed to warn the public of severe weather events Data sparse regions – very few lightning/radar networks Satellite and NWP blended products (WMO SWFDP) In SA: using local version of UKMO Unified Model (12km) NWCSAF v2012 tested with case studies over SA/SADC NWCSAF v2013 installed operationally in SA during 2014 Southern African domain since Oct 2014. CRR and RDT, no other products yet
CRR example: Daily rainfall CRR vs Hydroe vs raingauges for 23 Feb 2010 (using v2012) Rain gauges Hydroestimator Using 1 MSG channel CRR using 3 MSG channels
CRR example: Daily rainfall CRR and Hydroe vs TRMM for 2 Jan 2014 (using v2012) Hydroestimator Using 1 MSG channel CRR using 3 MSG channels
CRR validation against daily rainfall totals over South Africa (using v2013) • International Preciptiation Working Group (IPWG) • Different rainfall algorithms (NWP and satellite) • 0.25° resolution • Daily rain gauges (24 hour) totals • Hydroestimator (1 MSG channel) and CRR (3 MSG channels) added to this suite of products
CRR validation thus far… • Encouraging • Better than Hydroestimator in Oct-Dec 2014 • Will continue monitoring…
RDT example 9 Nov 2012 (v2012) 1130 UTC 1130 UTC
RDT example 20 September 2014 – Afternoon thunderstorms and hail in JhB (v2013) Operational! v2013
RDT validation against lightning data over South Africa (v2012) • No lighting data input • Bufr to hdf5 • Growing and mature phases used for validation • Validated against SALDN – CG lightning only. 10 min before and after each RDT time step • Object-oriented methodology (R, SpativalVx)
9 Oct 2012 v2012 Graphs supplied by Morne Gijben R statistical software used with SpatialVx package for O-O validation developed at NCAR
RDT validation against lightning data over South Africa (v2013) • No lighting data input • No OT detection input • Bufr3 output since Dec 2013 • Growing, mature and decaying phases used for validation • Validated against SALDN – CG lightning only. 10 min before and after each RDT time step • Between 1100 and 1800 UTC (13:00 and 20:00 SA local time) • Object-oriented methodology (R, SpativalVx)
Conclusions and Future work • Encouraging results especially for data sparse regions! • Submission to national journal accepted for publication • Add lightning (and OT?) as input data (this year) • Validate against radar (where available) over SA • New HPC, latest upgrades of UM (this year) – 4km, 1.5km • Funded research project 2015-2017 • NWCSAF V2015?