The main characteristics of the LETKF data assimilation system over the Euro-Mediterranean domain are:

• Domain and resolution: the system is running on the Mediterranean-European domain with 40 ensemble members plus a deterministic member, having a 0.0625° grid spacing (~7 km) and 49 vertical levels. The configuration is defined on a rotated regular grid, the coordinates of rotated north pole are (47.0,-10.0).
• Observations: the observational dataset operationally ingested comprises radiosonde ascents (RAOB), surface pressure observations from land and sea stations (SYNOP, SHIP, BUOY), manual and automatic aircraft observations, atmospheric motion vectors from Meteosat, European wind profilers, scatterometer winds from METOP A-B, NOAA/MetopA-B MSUA/MHS and NPP ATMS radiances.
• Lateral Boundary conditions: they are from IFS deterministic run perturbed using ECMWF-EPS.
• Surface perturbations: Stochastic perturbations of sea surface temperature.
• Model and sampling error: "Relaxation-to-prior spread" multiplicative inflation method according to Whitaker et al. 2012 and additive noise from scaled ECMWF EPS.

References:Whitaker, J. S. and Hamill, T. M. 2012. Evaluating methods to account for system errors in ensemble data assimilation. Mon. Wea. Rev. 140, 3078_3089.


The main characteristics of the high-resolution LETKF data assimilation system are:

• Domain and resolution: the system is running on the Italian domain with 40 ensemble members plus a deterministic member, having a 0.02° grid spacing (~2.2 km) and 65 vertical levels. The configuration is defined on a rotated regular grid, the coordinates of rotated north pole are (47.0,-10.0).
• Observations: the observational dataset operationally ingested comprises radiosonde ascents (RAOB), surface pressure observations from land and sea stations (SYNOP, SHIP, BUOY), manual and automatic aircraft observations, atmospheric motion vectors from Meteosat, European wind profilers, scatterometer winds from METOP A-B, NOAA/MetopA-B MSUA/MHS and NPP ATMS radiances.
• Lateral Boundary conditions: they are from IFS deterministic run perturbed using ECMWF-EPS.
• Surface perturbations: Stochastic perturbations of sea surface temperature, soil moisture and temperature.
• Model and sampling error: "Relaxation-to-prior perturbation", multiplicative covariance inflation method and climatological additive covariance inflation.

HIGH-RESOLUTION LETKF ANALYSIS DOMAIN: