Operational Real-Time Production of CMORPH2

Real-time production of the second generation CMORPH (CMORPH2) has been migrated to and executed at a NOAA / NWS required operational environment, the NWS/NCEP Central Operation (NCO) and Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Compute Farm (CF) effective December 2022.  CMORPH2 real-time production was routinely implemented on a research and development environment at NOAA/CPC since April 2017. Successful migration of the production system to the 7/24 operational environment ensures the production of the high-resolution, high-quality global precipitation analysis at a much higher stability and reduced production latency of one hour, satisfying a requirement for an observational analysis to be infused into operational forecast models and routine field operations.

Inputs to the CMORPH2 real-time production include rainfall and snowfall rate retrievals from passive microwave (PMW) measurements aboard more than 10 low earth orbit (LEO) satellites, precipitation estimates derived from infrared (IR) observations of geostationary (GEO) and LEO platforms, and model precipitation forecast from the NCEP operational global forecast system (GFS).  These inputs are first inter-calibrated to ensure quantitative consistencies. The inter-calibrated PMW retrievals and IR-based precipitation estimates are then propagated from their respective observation times to the target analysis time along the cloud motion vectors from both the forward and backward directions. The propagated PMW and IR based precipitation estimates are finally integrated into a single field of global precipitation through the Kalman Filter framework. In addition to the total precipitation, fraction of solid precipitation is computed from the surface air temperature and other surface meteorological variables using the algorithm of Sims and Liu (2015).

The CMORPH2 satellite precipitation analysis is constructed on a 0.05^o latitude/longitude over the entire globe (90^oS-90^oN) and in a 30-minute temporal resolution. The real-time production is first generated at a very short latency of one hour and then refreshed with any newly available inputs once every 30 minutes up to 12 hours of latency for improved accuracy when inouts from all sources are available in most cases. The CMORPH2 real-time production is utilized by several important users including the NWS Aviation center (AWC), Weather Prediction Center (WPC), and NWS Alaska Office, and pushed to the AWIPS for field applications. 

Work is under way to examine the CMORPH2 real-time production as a function of region, season, precipitation type, and production latency, and to further improve the CMORPH2 through infusing the PMW precipitation retrievals from the NOAA Direct Broadcast (DB) systems and refining the GEO IR based precipitation estimates. Results will be reported at the 2023 EGU Meetings.