Dr. Nobumasa Komori (JAMSTEC) visited UMD

On Monday, May 14, Dr. Nobumasa Komori from the Earth Simulator Center, JAMSTEC (Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology) visited College Park and gave a talk at our regular Weather-Chaos meeting on the Coupled Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Model (CGCM) for the Earth Simulator, so-called "CFES". The Earth Simulator is a Japanese flagship supercomputer system located in Yokohama. Dr. Komori was visiting our area for attending a conference in Silver Spring in the previous week. Dr. Komori was a colleague of Professor Enomoto, who visited UMD in March, and is also my collaborator since 2005. We are currently collaborating very closely to apply the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) to the CFES. Since Dr. Komori has been working on the modeling effort of CFES, he talked about CFES simulations and the reduced-resolution version known as "CFES-mini", that we use for CFES-LETKF. It was quite intriguing to hear about the cutting-edge simulation studies on the coupled atmosphere-ocean system at a relatively high resolution.

Goodbye Masaru!

In the end of March, Masaru Kunii finished his 2-year stay in my lab as a visiting researcher from the Meteorological Research Institute, Japan Meteorological Agency, and went back to Japan. He was a very dedicated researcher, kept working very hard and consistently, and accomplished a number of developments and original research. The most important achievements include the development of the WRF-LETKF system and the pioneering research on forecast sensitivity to observations with the ensemble approach of Liu and Kalnay (2008). I would like to highlight his scientific achievements in another blog entry near future.

For now, I would like to illuminate his achievement of finishing his first marathon in Baltimore 6 months ago. The picture above is what we took by ourselves with the Maryland Double medals/t-shirts and the corresponding Frederick Half-marathon and Baltimore Marathon finisher medals. I believe running was not his habit before he came to Maryland. I started running after I moved to Maryland, so did he. In 1 and a half years of his running career, he finished his first Marathon in Baltimore Running Festival in October 2011. This was my third marathon. I had a very nice company to be at the start line together in the early morning of the race day. I will do my third Maryland Double this year (what is shown in the picture is my second MD Double medal), but this time, alone again. I will miss Masaru on the race days.

Professor Takeshi Enomoto (Kyoto U) visited UMD and NCEP

On Monday, March 12, Professor Takeshi Enomoto from the Kyoto University visited College Park and gave a talk about the OREDA project (Observing System Research and Ensemble Data Assimilation Development Research) at our regular Weather-Chaos meeting. Professor Enomoto is my long-time collaborator since 2005 when we started applying the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter (LETKF) to the Earth Simulator Global Model known as AFES (Atmospheric General Circulation Model for the Earth Simulator). He presented the revised version of AFES-LETKF Experimental Reanalysis (ALERA2) and showed the most recent results of global coupled ocean-atmosphere data assimilation using the LETKF.

On Tuesday, March 13, Professor Enomoto visited the NCEP in Camp Springs, and gave another talk about a completely different topic on his work on dynamical core developments. He talked about approaches to reduce numerical errors without much increase of computational time. The wide range of topics that he covered really impressed me.

On Wednesday, March 14, Professor Enomoto spent a whole day in College Park again, mainly meeting with our postdocs and students to discuss about research ideas. His 3-day visit to Maryland was very fruitful and constructive to us, and hopefully to him, too. I feel very lucky to have this close and long-time collaboration with him.

A paper on WRF-LETKF has been published

Miyoshi, T. and M. Kunii, 2012: The Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter with the Weather Research and Forecasting Model: Experiments with Real Observations. Pure and Appl. Geophys., 169, 321-333. doi:10.1007/s00024-011-0373-4

Dr. Kosuke Ito (National Taiwan U) visited NCEP and UMD

On Monday, February 27, Dr. Kosuke Ito from the National Taiwan University visited UMD and presented his work on Tropical Cyclones at our regular Weather-Chaos meeting. He also visited NCEP and gave the EMC seminar on February 28.

His research focused on including surface exchange coefficients Cd/Ck in the control variables of 4-dimensional variational data assimilation. In this way, he could estimate these crucial model parameters for Tropical Cyclone evolution, and improved Tropical Cyclone analyses both in an idealized experiment and in a real Typhoon case. Estimating key model parameters is one of the frontier research topics, and it was very interesting to see his pioneering work.

A paper on observation error correlations has been accepted

Miyoshi, T., E. Kalnay, and H. Li, 2012: Estimating and including observation error correlations in data assimilation. Inv. Prob. Sci. Eng., in press.

A paper on lateral boundary perturbations has been published

Saito, K., H. Seko, M. Kunii, and T. Miyoshi, 2012: Effect of lateral boundary perturbations on the breeding method and the local ensemble transform Kalman filter for mesoscale ensemble prediction. Tellus, 64A, 11594. doi:10.3402/tellusa.v64i0.11594