Assimilating satellite observations of clouds and precipitation into NWP models

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Center for Satellite Data Assimilation (JCSDA) sponsored an international workshop on assimilating observations in cloudy and precipitating regions in 2005. The workshop sessions covered the existing status of cloud and precipitation assimilation at NWP centers, special issues related to cloud- and precipitation-affected observations, radiative transfer modeling, cloud and precipitation representation in numerical models, and problems of integrating such data in operational data assimilation systems. Working group summaries and recommendations were discussed in a final plenary session and were integrated into a set of recommendations to ECMWF and JCSDA, and other NWP centers. Some of the major issues that were identified by the workshop's working groups included modeling data assimilation, verification, and observations.