AMV Superobbing at the Met Office
In 2003 an AMV superobbing scheme was developed at the Met Office by Howard Berger, a visiting scientist from the University of Wisconsin – CIMSS. Initial trials were slightly negative, and the work was put on hold. More recently we have looked at this option again. We wanted to trial applying the superob approach without additionally reducing the observation errors. We also expected that the expanding AMV data volumes could enhance the benefits from superobbing.
In this paper we will show results of recent trials at the Met Office using AMV superobbing. We will also discuss follow on work to investigate the option of a combined superob/thinning scheme. The idea of this approach is to superob in most regions, but to revert to thinning if there is more variability in wind speed or direction. Potentially this idea could be extended to enable use of AMVs at higher resolution in regions of interest.
