Andrew Mahre- April 19- Convective Meteorology Seminar

Convective Meteorology (Mesoscale Dynamics) Seminar

Quantifying the Benefits of a Rapid-Scanning Weather Radar System

Andrew Mahre

Friday, April 19

3:00 pm/NWC 5600

With NEXRAD now approaching the 30-year mark since its installation, intense study has been underway on designing a replacement national weather radar system. One system design framework—a multifunction phased array radar (MPAR) system—is designed to meet the needs of several end users simultaneously, including NOAA, FAA, DoD, and DHS. More recently, a weather-only radar system with update times on the order of one minute has been investigated.

In this study, scanning strategies which meet or exceed the preliminary performance requirements for a notional replacement system are developed and tested. During the development of these scanning strategies, careful attention has been paid to tradeoffs in spatial resolution, temporal sampling, and data quality. An assessment of the benefits of each scanning method is obtained via multiple radar simulators. The outputs of these radar simulators are analyzed in a quantitative fashion—i.e., comparing latency times for tornado debris signature (TDS) detection, and comparing data quality estimates—and in a qualitative sense, by comparing radar output from various scanning strategies. Additionally, preliminary results from an adaptive scanning strategy using a cost function to maximize data quality are shown. This method utilizes estimates of radar moment errors to re-allocate pulses along each radar radial to maximize the number of locations with acceptable error estimates, similar in principle to an adaptive beam spoiling method outlined in Weber et al. (2017). These results are combined to assess feasibility and tradeoffs of various scanning strategies within a rapid-scan weather radar framework.