[AVX Seminar] Pedro Miranda

Title: New water vapor observations and the predictability of atmospheric storms

Speaker: Pedro Miranda

Affiliation : IDL – Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa

The Instituto Dom Luiz is a Research Center devoted to Geosciences and aligned around three thematic lines on “Climate Change”, “Solid Earth Dynamics”, and “Energy and Earth Resources” with a strong impact on life on earth.

Some of the research going on at this Institute will be covered in this presentation.

Abstract

The quality of rain forecasts is limited by model shortcomings (in physics and numerics), but also by the uncertainty in the atmospheric initial state. A successful strategy to address that issue has been the development of powerful ensemble forecast techniques. Recent work, however, indicates that there is still some scope to improve forecasts by the clever use of new sources of data. The atmospheric noise in Synthetic Aperture Radar Interferograms (InSAR) can be used to produce very high resolution maps of integrated water vapor, and its assimilation by a numerical weather prediction model can improve the forecasts of water vapor and precipitation.​ These developments have an increasing relevance in environmental prediction for many applications, including climate change.