NWCSAF/High Resolution Winds: AMV Software for Geostationary and Polar Satellites – Status in 2021
The “High Resolution Winds (HRW) software”, developed inside the “Satellite Application Facility on support to Nowcasting and very short range forecasting (NWCSAF)” standalone software packages, provides a detailed calculation of Atmospheric Motion Vectors and Trajectories locally and in real time by its users.
Considering its use with geostationary satellites, the latest version was released to users in January 2020 inside NWC/GEO v2018.1 software package. This version is operational with MSG, Himawari and GOES-16 satellites. An extension to GOES-17 satellite is also planned for release in 2021.
Considering its use with polar satellites, an adaptation of “HRW software” to 12 polar satellites with AVHRR-3/VIIRS/MODIS radiometers is going to be provided for the first time to users in next release of NWC/PPS software package in 2021. For this, the software will use reprojected polar images from all these satellites in static regions, and will optimize the calculation through a process that defines the best pair of images for each run.
With both elements, “HRW software” will permit the calculation of AMVs and Trajectories in all corners of the world with the same algorithm, which for the moment is rather uncommon. This option can be important for example for use in global NWP models or climatic studies.
Further developments in “HRW software”, including the adaptation to the new European MTG satellite series, have also started for the new NWCSAF CDOP-4 working phase since 2022.
