OBJECTIVE

ANALYSIS

Presented by
Sreekuttty Radhakrishnan
FEN-2020-09-008
OBJECTIVE ANALYSIS

Meteorological Observations are taken at a number of stations which are

unevenly located at different places .
Objective analysis is the process of interpolating meteorological observations
to a network of evenly spaced grid points .
Objective Analysis is based not only on the synoptic observations at the time
of analysis or climatology but also predicted ones from previous observations
for the time of analysis , satellite observation etc.
The inclusion of the time dimension in objective analysis is known as four
dimensional data assimilation .
In general , an objective analysis scheme should perform several functions .
Such as ….
Interpolation , removal of erroneous data , smoothing

Objective Analysis are invaluable in observational studies of the

atmospheric general circulation .

Atmospheric energy , heat , moisture and chemical constituent budgets ,

such as boundary fluxes ,generation ,dissipation and convection terms can
be calculated from objective analysis .
The purpose of objective analysis is to provide gridded estimates of variables
from observations that are irregularly distributed in space or time

Why gridded fields may be desired .

1. Simple purpose of displaying and contouring the data , most contouring

packages require gridded input
2. Gridded observations are required by widely used and popular techniques
used today for diagnostic calculations that involve derivative estimation
3. To provide initial conditions for a numerical forecast model
 COMMONLY USED ANALYSIS
TECHNIQUES
Surface fitting method

Empirical linear interpolation method

Cressman Analysis

Barnes Analysis

Optimum interpolation
SURFACE FITTING METHOD

Panofsky in 1949 .
The surfaces were defined by means of 2D polynomials . One for each sub-region .

Panofsky made the first attempt to fit mathematical functions to two dimensional
meteorological data.
He arbitrarily divided his map of report into sub-region
Each containing 10-20 observations .
In each sub-region , Panofsky fitted the observations with a 3rd degree polynomial
He sought a good fit between the analysis height and the observed height fields .
He sought to minimize the angle between observed wind and analyzed height gradient .
Coefficient to vary smoothly from one region to another sub-region ,they where expressed in
polynomials in X and Y .
In this way discontinuities were avoided at boundaries between regions
Methods Of Surface Fitting
 Ordinary least square fitting .
 Weighted least square fitting .
 Splines .
Advantages
Attractive method for small number of observations .
No background field is required
Account for observational error
Disadvantages
Computationally expensive when large number of observations are considered
One must be wary of under fitting , over fitting , or using the wrong set of
functions
EMPIRICAL LINEAR INTERPOLATION
The empirical linear interpolation was popular from the late 1950 to about
1980.
In this method , model grid point values are derived using the values of
variable from near by location .
 Bergthorsson and Doos (1955)were first to introduce the method .
 They obtained a gridded analysis of the height field
Which relied upon many different sources of information such as..
i. The background height field from model forecast
ii. Climatology
iii. Height and wind observation
CRESSMAN METHOD

The cressman(1959)scheme , is the first operational successive corrections

OA scheme used at the National Weather Service , USA during the early
period of numerical weather prediction .
Cressman introduced this interpolation method which corrects the
background grid point value by a linear combination of corrections between
predicted and observed values

 It uses a non-zero weighted function with in prescribed radius of influence

 This radius of influence decreases with each successive scan . After a large
number of a scan the grid value converges to the observation.
I.e. ,
Three kinds of observations handled by the cressman
successive correction scheme :
 Height only
 Wind only
 Height and wind together
R is the scan radius and d is the distance from the grid
point at the center of the circle to the observation .
 Height(I index)
 Wind(j index)
 Height and wind (k index )
The radius of influence is R ; its value decreases on
successive scans .
Advantages
 This method is simple and computationally fast
 Can be multivariable
 Procedure is tunable
 The result are generally pleasing
Disadvantages
 This scheme is not well suited for divers observations because
observational error is not accounted for .
 Does not account for uneven distribution of data
 Scale of result varies with observational density
 Optimum values of R , v ,etc. are determined by trial and errors
BARNES SCHEME

The Barnes in 1964 proposed a scheme to interpolate randomly spaced data

onto a grid with desired level of accuracy .
Barnes method is still popular with researchers who wish to analyse the
observations but do not have access to a numerical model .
It is based on linear combination of the observation.
The Barnes weighting function is given by ;
Wj = exp [-r^2/4k]
Where ‘r’ is the distance from the grid point to observation and ‘k’ is the
parameter to define the response of weighting function
K is chosen so that when r=d , the weighted function is e^-4 times maximum
value of data at r=0.
Radius of influence is chosen so that it is greater than mean spacing of
observations
The iterative process for obtaining the grid point values is as follows ;

1. On first scan , estimate the value of variable at each grid point using
equation
2. Estimate the variable value for each observation located by averaging the
four closest grid values
3. Calculate the difference between estimated and observed value at each
observation location .
4. Distribute the differences on to the grid points using linear interpolation
scheme described above with the Barnes weighting function
5. Repeat the last 3 steps (2-4) until the observation value is less than pre-
defined value
Advantages
 there is no need to set an influence radius .
 Only two passes are necessary
 No background field is required

Disadvantages are similar to cressman analysis .

OPTIMUM INTERPOLATION

The last of the older techniques for 4D data assimilation is a statistical

approach called optimum interpolation .
In this method , the ensemble average of the squared difference between the
gridded and observed data is minimized using the method of least squaring .

Steps
• Values of the model fields are derived at each of the observation location
using an objective analysis .
• Difference between the model based values and the actual observation
values , which are called observation increment , that are obtained at each
observation location .
• Find out the weights that are assigned to each of the observation
location in order to estimate the observation increment value at the
each of the mode grid point .
• Then , the analysis increment are added to background values at each
model grid point to generate a new .
Advantages
Estimate of analysis error produced as a function of the distribution and
accuracy of the data
Disadvantages
 Computationally more expensive than other commonly used methods
 Not designed for best performance during extreme event
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