Assimilation Process

This animation shows two important sources of atmospheric data, satellites and weather balloons (radiosondes). The movie contains data from a 5 day period. Each frame represents 1 hour.

The top panel shows satellite temperature observations. These observations are a vertical slice of the atmosphere's temperature taken from satellite measurements of reflected solar radiation. Notice the relatively narrow swath and limited coverage for each hour.

The bottom panel shows radiosonde observations for the same time period. These observations are taken mostly over land and only about once every 12 hours.

The job of a data assimilation system is to bring together intermittent data like these into a single continuous approximation for the entire globe.

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