Definition of the moist-air exergy norm: a comparison with existing "moist energy norms"

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new moist-air exergy norm based on moist-air available enthalpy, offering improved weighting factors for temperature and water vapor that align better with observed analysis increments and vary significantly with altitude.

Contribution

The study develops a novel moist-air exergy norm derived from thermodynamic principles, enhancing the accuracy of forecast error and sensitivity analyses.

Findings

New norm's weighting factors differ from existing ones.

Weighting factors increase significantly with height.

Norm aligns better with observed analysis increments.

Abstract

This study presents a new formulation for the norms and scalar products used in tangent linear or adjoint models to determine forecast errors and sensitivity to observations and to calculate singular vectors. The new norm is derived from the concept of moist-air available enthalpy, which is one of the availability functions referred to as exergy in general thermodynamics. It is shown that the sum of the kinetic energy and the moist-air available enthalpy can be used to define a new moist-air squared norm which is quadratic in: 1) wind components; 2) temperature; 3) surface pressure; and 4) water vapor content. Preliminary numerical applications are performed to show that the new weighting factors for temperature and water vapor are significantly different from those used in observation impact studies, and are in better agreement with observed analysis increments. These numerical applications confirm that the weighting factors for water vapor and temperature exhibit a large increase with height (by several orders of magnitude) and a minimum in the middle troposphere, respectively.