Graphical Abstract

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Chen, Y., J. Wang, Y. Gao, X. Chen, H. Wang, and X.-Y. Huang, 2018: Refinement of the use of inhomogeneous background error covariance estimated from historical forecast error samples and its impact on short-term regional numerical weather prediction. J. Meteor. Soc. Japan, 96, 429-446.
https://doi.org/10.2151/jmsj.2018-048   Graphical Abstract with highlights

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Highlights:

• The benefits of using a blending approach (BEC-BLD), which combines a static, homogeneous BEC and an inhomogeneous and anisotropic BEC, are assessed by conducting single observation assimilation experiments and continuous-cycling data assimilation and forecasting experiments covering a 3-week period.
• Single observation experiments indicate that the noise in the increments in the extended alpha control variable approach (BEC-CVA) can be somehow reduced by using BEC-BLD(Fig.1), while the inhomogeneous and multivariable correlations from BEC-CVA are still taken into account.
• The FSS of 6h accumulated precipitation over the 3 weeks show that BEC-CVA and BEC-BLD outperform the use of 3DVar. BEC-CVA and BEC-BLD underperform ETKF-3DVar, as expected.