Assimilation of FY-3 data at the Met Office
https://phys.org/news/2018-06-assimilation-fy-met-office.html
The assimilation of observations from the MWHS instruments is shown to have a beneficial impact on the Met Office global model and significantly participates to the 24-h global forecast error reduction. In addition, the study demonstrates how the operational monitoring allows rapid detection of data anomalies that are fed back to CMA for investigation and remedy.
In parallel, MWRI ascending-descending bias is investigated and a bias correction method is proposed. MWRI ascending-descending bias is a complex bias varying with the orbital angle (i.e. the angle between the center of Earth and the satellite position with respect to the ecliptic plane). Such a bias has been previously observed in the data of the U.S. DMSP instrument Special Sensor Microwave Imager Sounder (SSMIS) and a specific bias correction has been developed at the Met Office. The development of MWRI bias correction is based on the work carried out for SSMIS and the future assimilation of bias corrected MWRI observations is expected to strongly benefit NWP models.