Observations have been and are an important part of today's meteorological developments. Surface observations are very useful as they are, providing weather information for a point location. ough they do not give much information, if any, on what happens between the stations across a larger area. With models one can create an analysis of the meteorological situation, i.e. calculate and estimate what happens between these fixed observation points. Remote-sensing data, such as radar and satellite, are being processed and the output is given over a domain as an analysed product of their measurements. For example, radar gives a plot of where the rain is located, i.e. an analysis of the current precipitation.
With a series of radar images, a human (subjectively) or a computer objectively) can process this information to estimate where the rain will move and be located within the next few minutes (even hours), i.e. a short forecast also called "nowcast". is applies to some extent also for other observations, such as satellite data (cloud propagation). But for most quantities (such as temperature, wind, etc) it is significantly harder to make such a nowcast, since these are influenced by many other factors and there is no linear development of them. Therefore, there are forecast models that solve physical and dynamic equations, so that one can estimate the future weather for the coming hours and days. A prerequisite for generating a forecast of high quality is to capture the initial weather conditions as best as possible.
This is done using observations and they are introduced into the forecast model through different techniques, where the model creates its own analysis as the initial step. There remain problems since forecast models often are affected by physical disagreements, as the dynamic conditions are not in balance. This results in the model having a spin-up effect, where the meteorological quantities are not yet in balance with each other and the resulting weather conditions are not always reliable during the first hours. Hence, a lot of research is spent on how to reduce this spin-up effect and on the use of nowcast models, in order to deliver the best model results for the first few hours of the forecast period.
In this dissertation, the research work has been to improve the meteorological analysis, algorithms and functionality, using the Local Analysis and Prediction System (LAPS) model. Different kinds of observations were used and their interdependencies have been studied, in order to combine and merge information from variousinstruments. Primarily focus has been to improve the estimation of precipitation accumulation and meteorological quantities that affect wind energy. The LAPS developments have been used for several end-users and nowcasting applications, and experimentally as initial conditions for forecast modelling. The studies have been concentrated on Finland and nearby sea areas, with the available datasets for this domain.
By combining surface-station measurements, radar and lightning information, one can improve the precipitation-amount estimations. The use of lightning data further improves the estimates and gives the advantage of having additional data outside radar coverage, which can potentially be very useful for example over sea areas. In addition, the improved LAPS analyses (cloud-related quantities) and a newly developed model (LOWICE), calculating the electricity production during wintertime (taking into account the icing of wind turbine rotor blades which reduces efficiency), have shown good results
