TY - JOUR
T1 - Wind forecasts for rocket and balloon launches at the Esrange Space Center using the WRF Model
AU - Fonseca, Ricardo
AU - Martín-Torres, Javier
AU - Andersson, Kent
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments. This work is partly funded by the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB) through the NRFP-3 program and Luleå University of Technology (LTU). We are grateful to the High Performance Computing Center North (HPC2N) for providing the computer resources needed to perform the numerical experiments presented in this paper. We would like to acknowledge Martin Bysell, Klas Nehrman, Mikael Viertotak, and Per Baldemar from the Swedish Space Corporation (SSC), for their assistance and valuable discussions that helped to shape this paper. We would also like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their detailed and insightful comments and suggestions that helped to improve the quality of the paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 American Meteorological Society.
PY - 2018/6/1
Y1 - 2018/6/1
N2 - High-altitude balloons and rockets are regularly launched at the Esrange Space Center (ESC) in Kiruna, Sweden, with the aim of retrieving atmospheric data for meteorological and space studies in the Arctic region. Meteorological conditions, particularly wind direction and speed, play a critical role in the decision of whether to go ahead with or postpone a planned launch. Given the lack of high-resolution wind forecasts for this remote region, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is used to downscale short-term forecasts given by the Global Forecast System (GFS) for the ESC for six 5-day periods in the warm, cold, and transition seasons. Three planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes are considered: the local Mellor-Yamada-Janjic (MYJ), the nonlocal Yonsei University (YSU), and the hybrid local-nonlocal Asymmetric Convective Model 2 (ACM2). The ACM2 scheme is found to provide the most skillful forecasts. An analysis of the WRF Model output against the launch criteria for two of the most commonly launched vehicles, the sounding rockets Veículo de Sondagem Booster-30 (VSB-30) and Improved Orion, reveals probability of detection (POD) values that always exceeds 60% with the false alarm rate (FAR) generally below 50%. It is concluded that the WRF Model, in its present configuration, can be used to generate useful 5-day wind forecasts for the launches of these two rockets. The conclusions reached here are applicable to similar sites in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
AB - High-altitude balloons and rockets are regularly launched at the Esrange Space Center (ESC) in Kiruna, Sweden, with the aim of retrieving atmospheric data for meteorological and space studies in the Arctic region. Meteorological conditions, particularly wind direction and speed, play a critical role in the decision of whether to go ahead with or postpone a planned launch. Given the lack of high-resolution wind forecasts for this remote region, the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) Model is used to downscale short-term forecasts given by the Global Forecast System (GFS) for the ESC for six 5-day periods in the warm, cold, and transition seasons. Three planetary boundary layer (PBL) schemes are considered: the local Mellor-Yamada-Janjic (MYJ), the nonlocal Yonsei University (YSU), and the hybrid local-nonlocal Asymmetric Convective Model 2 (ACM2). The ACM2 scheme is found to provide the most skillful forecasts. An analysis of the WRF Model output against the launch criteria for two of the most commonly launched vehicles, the sounding rockets Veículo de Sondagem Booster-30 (VSB-30) and Improved Orion, reveals probability of detection (POD) values that always exceeds 60% with the false alarm rate (FAR) generally below 50%. It is concluded that the WRF Model, in its present configuration, can be used to generate useful 5-day wind forecasts for the launches of these two rockets. The conclusions reached here are applicable to similar sites in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
KW - Arctic
KW - Forecast verification/skill
KW - Hindcasts
KW - Numerical analysis/modeling
KW - Numerical weather prediction/forecasting
KW - Short-range prediction
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85048660164&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1175/WAF-D-18-0031.1
DO - 10.1175/WAF-D-18-0031.1
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85048660164
SN - 0882-8156
VL - 33
SP - 813
EP - 833
JO - Weather and Forecasting
JF - Weather and Forecasting
IS - 3
ER -