Four-dimensional High-resolution National Radar Mosaic

Jian Zhang
National Severe Storms Laboratory, OAR

The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) is undertaking a National Radar Mosaic project to seamlessly mosaic all National Weather Service (NWS) and Department of Defense (DOD) WSR-88D radars into a high resolution 4-dimensional mosaic providing the first high resolution depiction of storms in the United States from coast to coast. The advent of internet-2 and effective compression techniques facilitates the transmission of base level radar data from NEXRAD network economically and in real time as demonstrated by the CRAFT (The Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test, Droegemeier et al., 2002) project. The result is the ability to integrate the full resolution multiple radar data into a single framework at high-resolution time and space scales. This has been realized in a 3D multiple radar mosaic system that is developed at the NSSL (Zhang et al., 2001). The system has been generating 3D mosaic of base reflectivity from 32 radars on a grid of 1km resolution (500m in vertical) in real-time for the FAA CIWS (Corridor Integrated Weather System) domain since August of 2002 (Zhang et al., 2002).

The National Weather Service (NWS) is now implementing an architecture to collect and to distribute base level data from ~130 NEXRAD sites to NCDC, NCEP and other users in near real-time (Crum et al., 2003) by the end of year 2003. The architecture will be expanded to 154 radars by the end of year 2004. In the light of this development, the NSSL is implementing a national 3D radar mosaic grid of 1km resolution and 5 minute update cycle. And the 3D mosaic will be upgraded to a 4D dynamically updating grid in year 2004. The infrastructure of the national 4D mosaic and related products will be presented at the workshop.

References:

Crum, T.D., D. Evancho, C. Horvat, M. Istok, and W. Blanchard, 2003: NEXRAD program plans for collecting and distributing WSR-88D base data in near real time. Preprints, 19th Int. Conf. on Interactive Information Processing Systems (IIPS) for Meteorology, Oceanography, and Hydrology, Amer. Meteor. Soc., 9-13 February 2003, Long Beach, CA. Paper 14.2.

Droegemeier, K.K., K. Kelleher, T. D. Crum, J. Levit, S. A. DelGreco, L. Miller, C. Sinclair, M. Benner, S.W. Fulker, and H. Edmon, 2002: Project CRAFT: A test bed for demonstrating the real time acquisition and archival of WSR-88D Level II Data, Preprints, 18th Int. Conf. on Interactive Information Processing Systems (IIPS) for Meteorology, Oceanography, and Hydrology, Amer. Meteor. Soc., 13-17 January 2002, Orlando, FL, 136-139.

Zhang, J., J. J. Gourley, W. Xia, and K. Howard, 2002: 3D multi-radar reflectivity mosaic for the CIWS domain. Preprints, The 10th Conference on Aviation, Range, and Aerospace Meteorology. 13-16 May 2002, Portland, Oregon, J107-J109.

Zhang, J., J. J. Gourley, K. Howard, and B. Maddox, 2001: Three-dimensional gridding and mosaic of reflectivities from multiple WSR-88D radars. Preprints, The 30th International Radar Conference, 19-24 July 2001, Munich, Germany, 719-721.