WINDS DERIVED FROM GEOSTATIONARY SATELLITE MOISTURE CHANNEL OBSERVATIONS - APPLICATIONS AND IMPACT ON NUMERICAL WEATHER PREDICTION

Tropospheric motions deduced from sequential water vapor imagery provi ded by geostationary meteorological satellites can be utilized to infe r wind fields. Temporal tracking of moisture features yields spatially coherent vector fields in both cloudy and cloud-free regimes. These o bservations can be employed to augment existing operationally-availabl e data in order to provide improved upper-tropospheric wind analyses o ver meteorological scales ranging from sub-synoptic to global. It is d emonstrated through assimilation of these data into numerical weather prediction systems that modest forecast improvements can be realized. Forecast impact experiments yield small but positive results in: 1) hu rricane track forecasts, 2) regional-scale prediction, and 3) global-s cale prediction. Ongoing research and future prospects are discussed.