MATERHORN Program
Sponsor: Office of Naval Research
MATERHORN is a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative (MURI) led by University of Notre Dame dealing with weather prediction in complex terrain. It studied the predictability at mesoscale, in particular, the error growth (i.e., the sensitivity to initial conditions at various lead times), and develop meaningful measures of skill relative to appropriate conditional climatologies (i.e., the skill of capturing specific phenomena when they are supposed to appear; e.g., turbulence generation when a Richardson number criterion is satisfied). Sensitivities to input properties and boundary conditions will be investigated. Data assimilation studies will be conducted, and different techniques (e.g., 4DVAR, ensemble Kalman filtering, 3DVAR) will be compared.