Development of an Operational Multi-sensor and Multi-channel Aerosol Assimilation Package Using NAAPS and NAVDAS

Accurate prediction of regional and global scale aerosol phenomena is crtical to military operations, especially over regions of interests such as Middle East. For this reason, the US Navy developed the first operational global aerosol model in the world. Yet the forecast accuracy is limited by lack of observations over ocean and other data-poor areas. The long-term goal of this study is to improve the Navy’s electro-optical propagation forecast capability through the use of multi-channel and multisensor aerosol data assimilation.