The goal of this collaborative research proposal is to assimilate three-dimensional (3D) winds from an airborne lidar and a space based lidar to improve weather forecasts and advance our understanding…

This $630,555 federal research grant was awarded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to the University of California, Davis (UC Davis) to assimilate three-dimensional (3D) wind data from airborne and space-based Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) instruments. The goal is to improve weather forecasting and advance the understanding of dust-cloud interactions over the tropics. The work will involve integrating LIDAR wind data from NASA's Doppler Aerosol Wind LIDAR (DAWN) instrument on the DC-8 aircraft and the European Space Agency's AEOLUS satellite to enhance numerical weather prediction models. This research opportunity is not designated as a small business set-aside. UC Davis, as the prime contractor, will leverage its expertise in atmospheric sciences and climate research to support this effort, which runs through June 2026.

The goal of this collaborative research proposal is to assimilate three-dimensional (3D) winds from an airborne lidar and a space based lidar to improve weather forecasts and advance our understanding of dust-cloud interaction on the development and evolution of convective weather systems over the tropics. During summer 2020, a NASA-EAS joint field campaign will take place based at the cape verde islands. A coherent doppler aerosol wind lidar (dawn) instrument will be on the NASA DC8 aircraft to observe wind information in the planetary boundary layer below 4 KM. The wind data from dwan and meteorological data from dropsondes in and around the convective storms will provide a unique dataset that will improve the storm s initial conditions and allow for an assessment of its effects on numerical weather forecasts over the tropics. The 3D lidar winds will be combined with the vertical wind profiles obtained from aeolus, the world's first wind-mapping satellite launched in 2018. The combination of 3D wind retrievals from dawn and aeolus provides the scientific community with a unique research opportunity. To take advantage of this opportunity, we propose to assimilate these 3D lidar winds together with other observations to improve the forecasts of (i) convective weather systems, and (II) the large-scale environment over north africa and the eastern atlantic ocean, which includes the african easterly jet (AEJ), african easterly waves (aews), and plumes of saharan mineral dust (SMD) aerosols. To assess to what extent the lidar winds improve the forecasts, we will diagnose the thermodynamic and dynamic structure of the storms the structure and strength of the AEJ the tracks and energetics of aews and cloud processes. The analyses will also include examining how lidar-improved forecasts affect SMD-cloud interaction on convective weather systems. In particular, we will examine the effect of SMD as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), giant CCN (gccn) and ICE nuclei (in) on the modification of weather systems, including the storm s morphology, intensity, rain rate, mix-phased cloud processes, and the amount and distribution of supercooled water.