Global analyses of water vapor, cloud and precipitation derived from a diagnostic assimilation of SSM/I geophysical retrievals

An analytical approach is described for diagnostically assimilating moisture data from Special Sensor Microwave Imager (SSM/I) into a global analysis of water vapor, cloud content, and precipitation. In this method, 3D fields of wind and temperature values taken from ECMWF gridded analysis are used to drive moisture conservation equations with parameterized microphysical treatment of vapor, liquid, and ice; the evolving field of water vapor is periodically updated or constrained by SSM/I retrievals of precipitable water. Initial results indicate that this diagnostic model can produce realistic large-scale fields of cloud and precipitation. The resulting water vapor analyses agree well with SSM/I and have an additional advantage of being synoptic.