Research

Speaker: Nick Pedatella

Though widely used in the lower atmosphere for both operational and scientific purposes, data assimilation techniques have yet to be extensively adopted in the mesosphere, thermosphere, and ionosphere. This is despite the inherent benefits obtained by combining observations with a background model using data assimilation. In order to improve representation of variability in the mesosphere, thermosphere, and ionosphere, as well as provide initial conditions for studying predictability of the near-Earth space weather, the data assimilation capability was developed for the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model (WACCM) and WACCM with thermosphere-ionosphere eXtension (WACCMX) using the Data Assimilation Research Testbed (DART) ensemble Kalman filter. A brief overview of the development of WACCM+DART and WACCMX+DART will be provided, including how the application of data assimilation techniques differs between the lower and upper atmospheres. Drawing on several examples, it will be shown that using data assimilation can improve the representation of the chemical, dynamical, and electrodynamical variability of the middle and upper atmospheres. The use of WACCMX+DART for providing initial conditions for forecasting the space environment will also be presented. Despite the significant progress made in the development of whole atmosphere data assimilation, there remain many outstanding challenges. The presentation will conclude with a discussion of the key challenges facing current whole atmosphere data assimilation systems and an outlook for the future of whole atmosphere data assimilation.