Thomas Jones

Research Scientist III

Dr. Jones was hired as a research scientist in September 2010 by the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies in Norman, OK to study the effects of assimilating various forms of satellite data into storm-scale numerical weather prediction models using an Ensemble Kalman Filter technique as part of the Warn-on-Forecast (WoF) group. Ongoing research has focused primarily on two types of satellite observations. First, polar orbiting hyperspectral sounders provide information on the vertical profile of temperature and humidity in clear-sky conditions. Dr. Jones has conducted both real and synthetic data studies and determine that they can have a large impact on forecasts of significant weather events. Secondly, geostationary satellite such as GOES provide visible and infrared radiances at high temporal and spatial resolution making them ideal for WoF applications. In particular, assimilating retrieved of cloud properties (e.g. water path, cloud heights, phase) has led to a significant improvement the characterization of clouds during high impact weather events. As a result, assimilation of cloudy retrievals is now fully implemented in the latest WoF ensemble data assimilation system used for real-time testing in the Hazardous Weather Testbed. Additional research is underway to study the impacts of assimilating GOES Advanced Baseline Imager water vapor brightness temperatures and atmospheric motion vectors into storm-scale modeling environments.