Dynamic channel selection based on vertical sensitivities for the assimilation of FY‐4A geostationary interferometric infrared sounder targeted observations

Target observations have garnered significant attention owing to their successful applications in enhancing forecasting skills of extreme weather events, particularly tropical cyclone (TC) events. The key step of implementing target observation is to determine the sensitive area in advance. Previous studies often obtained the sensitive areas for TC forecasting by vertically integrating the energy of optimal perturbation and taking the horizontal area of large energy, in an attempt to use it to represent roughly the sensitivity of the whole atmospheric layer. The advent of the geostationary interferometric infrared sounder on the FY‐4A satellite and then corresponding satellite data assimilation have opened up a new possibility for identifying the vertical sensitivity for TC forecasting to improve the forecasting skill. This article proposes a targeting satellite channel (TSC) approach to accurately capture the sensitivity along vertical directions of the atmosphere that allows one to preferentially select the channels whose observations locate on the sensitive vertical atmospheric layers. Numerical experiments demonstrate that, when preferentially assimilating the channel observations obtained from the TSC approach, the TC tracks achieve a considerably smaller forecast error than the information entropy channel selection approach. The TSC approach, therefore, has the potential for the satellite data assimilation to improve TC track forecasting skill very effectively, which can also provide guidance to targeting observations in field campaigns for TC forecasting.