Quality Assessment and Assimilation of Meteosat-12 FCI AMVs

Title
Quality Assessment and Assimilation of Meteosat-12 FCI AMVs
Report
Date Published
11/2025
Series/Collection
EUMETSAT/ECMWF Fellowship Programme Research Report
Document Number
RR67
Author
Francis Warrick
Abstract Meteosat-12 AMVs are a significant upgrade to EUMETSAT’s geostationary AMV product, both in terms of making use of enhanced features of the new Meteosat Third Generation Flexible Combined Imager, as well as benefiting from a completely revised AMV derivation algorithm. The superior spatial and temporal resolution of its imager compared to Meteosat Second Generation gives a vast increase in the number of cloud features that can be tracked. Changes made to EUMETSAT’s AMV derivation, including the use of a smaller cloud target box, bring improvements to the data quality as well as an additional boost to data volume. There is a significant NWP forecast improvement from swapping the assimilation of Meteosat-10 AMVs for Meteosat-12 AMVs. Best results were achieved with hourly rather than half-hourly assimilation of the Meteosat-12 AMVs. The new Optimal Cloud Analysis height assignment scheme makes a small contribution to the forecast improvement, but the other derivation changes and increased data volume provide a larger benefit. Adding low level night-time AMVs from the 3.8 μm channel has a neutral to slightly negative forecast impact. After the Meteosat-12 launch in December 2022, problems with the FCI calibration mechanism delayed the arrival of FCI data. However, the cross-calibration MICMICs approach used for the Meteosat-12 imager performs well for AMV data quality which has been consistently high since the data started being received in November 2024. The improved forecast quality given by assimilation of Meteosat-12 AMVs is an early benefit of the MTG-I programme and demonstrates the importance of developing EUMETSAT’s AMV derivation. ECMWF was the first NWP centre to begin operational assimilation of the Meteosat-12 AMVs, beginning in June 2025.
URL https://www.ecmwf.int/en/elibrary/81700-quality-assessment-and-assimilation-meteosat-12-fci-amvs
DOI 10.21957/2c47c05527
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