Combining satellite and ground-based remote sensing for forecasting thunderstorms

Pub­lished in J. Appl. Mete­or. Cli­ma­tol., 64, 1411–1429, 2025:

This study attempts to assess the poten­tial ben­e­fit of a net­work of ground-based microwave radiome­ters (MWRs) in vari­able con­fig­u­ra­tion in syn­er­gy with simul­ta­ne­ous geo­sta­tion­ary satel­lite obser­va­tions from the Meteosat Third-Gen­er­a­tion Infrared Sounder (IRS) for observ­ing region­al atmos­pher­ic sta­bil­i­ty. Since both obser­va­tion types are not yet avail­able, reanaly­sis fields of the west­ern part of Ger­many (Rhein–Ruhr area) were used to sim­u­late MWR and IRS obser­va­tions. From these sim­u­la­tions, neur­al net­work retrievals for CAPE and lift­ed index (LI) were derived for satel­lite-only (IRS), ground-based-only (MWR), and syn­er­gis­tic (IRS + MWR) obser­va­tion con­fig­u­ra­tions. The devel­oped retrievals were applied to two years of sim­u­lat­ed obser­va­tions. In gen­er­al, the IRS + MWR retrievals out­per­form (up to 0.3 improve­ment in Hei­d­ke skill score) the IRS retrievals under clear sky and espe­cial­ly under cloudy con­di­tions, if both obser­va­tion types are avail­able simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and at the same loca­tion. The impact of adding one to 200 MWRs of the hypo­thet­i­cal obser­va­tion net­work to the satel­lite obser­va­tions was inves­ti­gat­ed using a spa­tial sta­tis­ti­cal inter­po­la­tion method. The fields of CAPE/LI from IRS obser­va­tions were merged with the CAPE/LI val­ues from the MWR net­work by tak­ing into account the cor­re­spond­ing error covari­ance matri­ces of both retrievals, which were derived from reanaly­sis data. It was shown that the con­tri­bu­tion of ground-based obser­va­tions is more pro­nounced under cloudy con­di­tions and is most valu­able for the first 25 sen­sors locat­ed in the domain.

Authors: Maria Toprov and Ulrich Löh­n­ert

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