Journal of the Meteorological Society of Japan. Ser. II
Online ISSN : 2186-9057
Print ISSN : 0026-1165
ISSN-L : 0026-1165
Volume 95, Issue 5
Displaying 1-3 of 3 articles from this issue
Articles
  • Shaoping WANG, Yongjian DING, Fengqing JIANG, Muhammad Naveed ANJUM, M ...
    2017 Volume 95 Issue 5 Pages 287-299
    Published: 2017
    Released on J-STAGE: September 16, 2017
    Advance online publication: June 01, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Supplementary material

     Northern Xinjiang (NX), China, located at the middle latitude of the Northern Hemisphere, has abundant snowfall and a long period of snow cover. In this study, to assess the impact of climate change in this region and to provide scientific knowledge for the resource management, analyses of the spatial and temporal variations in extreme snowfall events (ESEs) in NX was conducted based on five defined ESE indices: days of heavy snowfall (DHS), maximum 1-day snowfall amount (MASD), maximum 1-event snowfall amount (MASE), the maximum number of consecutive snowfall days (MDSE), and frequency of heavy snowfall events (HSE). To reconstruct the snowfall dataset, the relationship between air temperature and snowfall events was determined, and it was found that the daily minimum air temperature below 0°C is the best indicator to identify snowfall days. ESEs in NX occupied an increasing proportion of snow events, although the number of snowfall days decreased. Consistent increasing trends in all ESE indices were found for the entire NX region, while different changes in these indices were noted between subregions. With highly increasing trends of these ESE indices in most of subregions, the Daxigou–Xiaoquzi and Qitai areas were the hotspots for ESEs. Since these hotspots are likely influenced by airflow from the Arctic Ocean, the changes in the Arctic Ocean and the associated atmospheric circulation resulting from climate change might be the main reasons for the increasing trend of ESEs in NX.

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  • Shoken ISHII, Philippe BARON, Makoto AOKI, Kohei MIZUTANI, Motoaki YAS ...
    2017 Volume 95 Issue 5 Pages 301-317
    Published: 2017
    Released on J-STAGE: October 04, 2017
    Advance online publication: June 19, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Supplementary material

     A working group is studying the feasibility of a future Japanese space-borne coherent Doppler wind lidar (CDWL) for global wind profile observation. This study is composed of two companion papers: an instrumental overview of the space-borne CDWL for global wind profile observation (Part 1), and the wind measurement performance (error and bias) investigated using a full-fledged space-borne CDWL simulator (Part 2). This paper aims to describe the future space-borne CDWL in terms of technical points and observation user requirements. The future mission concept is designed to have two looks for vector wind measurement with vertical resolutions of 0.5 (lower troposphere: 0-3 km), 1 (middle troposphere: 3-8 km), and 2 km (upper troposphere: 8-20 km) and horizontal resolution of < 100 km along a satellite. The altitude and orbit of the satellite are discussed from a scientific viewpoint. The candidate altitude and orbit of the satellite are 220 km and an inclination angle of 96.4° (polar orbit) or 35.1° (low-inclination-angle orbit). The technical requirements of the space-borne CDWL are a single-frequency 2-μm pulse laser with an average laser power of 3.75 W, two effective 40-cm-diameter afocal telescopes, a wide-bandwidth (> 3.4 GHz) detector, a high-speed analog-to-digital converter, and a systematic lidar efficiency of 0.08. The space-borne CDWL looks at two locations at a nadir angle of 35° at two azimuth angles of 45° and 135° (225° and 315°) along the satellite track. The future space-borne CDWL wind profile observation will fill the gap of the current global wind observing systems and contribute to the improvement of the initial conditions for numerical weather prediction (NWP), the prediction of typhoons and heavy rain, and various meteorological studies.

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  • Philippe BARON, Shoken ISHII, Kozo OKAMOTO, Kyoka GAMO, Kohei MIZUTANI ...
    2017 Volume 95 Issue 5 Pages 319-342
    Published: 2017
    Released on J-STAGE: October 04, 2017
    Advance online publication: June 19, 2017
    JOURNAL FREE ACCESS
    Supplementary material

     A feasibility study of tropospheric wind measurements using a coherent Doppler lidar aboard a super low altitude satellite is being conducted in Japan. The considered lidar uses a 2.05 μm laser light source of 3.75 W. In order to assess the measurement performances, simulations of wind measurements were conducted. The mission definition is presented in a companion paper (Part 1) while, in this paper, we describe the measurement simulator and characterize the errors on the retrieved line-of-sight (LOS) winds. Winds are retrieved from the Doppler-shift of the noisy backscattered signal with a horizontal resolution of 100 km along the orbit track and a vertical resolution between 0.5 and 2 km. Cloud and wind fields are the pseudo-truth of an Observing System Simulation Experiment while aerosol data are from the Model-of-Aerosol-Species-IN-the-Global-AtmospheRe (MASINGAR) constrained with the pseudo-truth wind. We present the results of the analysis of a full month of data in summer time for a near-polar orbiting satellite and a LOS nadir angle of 35°. Below ≈ 8 km, the ratio of good retrievals is 30-55 % and the median LOS wind error is better than 0.6 m s−1 (1.04 m s−1 for the horizontal wind). In the upper troposphere, the ratio is less than 15 % in the southern hemisphere and high-latitudes. However, the ratio is still 35 % in the northern Tropics and mid-latitudes where ice-clouds frequently occur. The upper-tropospheric median LOS-wind measurement error is between 1-2 m s−1 depending on the latitude (1.74-3.5 m s−1 for the horizontal wind). These errors are dominated by uncertainties induced by spatial atmospheric inhomogeneities.

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