92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Wednesday, 25 January 2012
Providing Selectable Elevation Layer Mosaic Generation Capability and Improving the Quality of WARP Mosaic Products
Warren L. Qualley, Harris Corporation, Washington, DC; and T. Seitzinger, J. Lang, A. Moosakhanian, T. Nguyen, M. Printy, D. Thomas, and R. Sinclair
Manuscript (1.6 MB)

Poster PDF (200.6 kB)

In today's NAS environment weather is a major contributing factor in air traffic delays and safety concerns. To that effect it is key to continue improving current weather systems to ensure any limitations of those systems are addressed to aim for most efficient operations. Currently the enroute weather system, provides layer composite mosaic products for display on the Air Traffic controller display systems (DSR, ERAM, MEARTS and ATOP). The enroute weather system generates mosaics for four, fixed elevation layers: 0 – 24Kft, 24K – 33Kft, 24K – 60Kft and 0 – 60K ft and generates each of these layered mosaic products from a specific volume-based layer composite reflectivity product produced by WSR-88Ds at the completion of their volume scans. The system also generates an expanded set of radar mosaic products for display on meteorologist work station and briefing terminals and for dissemination to other FAA systems. Each of these mosaic products are also generated from a specific volume-based product produced by WSR-88Ds. Improvements to the current process of mosaic generation through utilization of multiple tilts of high resolution base reflectivity product data and generating mosaic products directly from the base product data rather than volume-based products will significantly improve the overall quality of today's mosaic products for en route and in turn aid in the improvement of current operations. This paper will specifically focus on the enroute weather system's radar mosaic generation capability and will explore how the limitations of the existing mosaic product set will be mitigated by the changes to the mosaic generation functions that have been proposed for the current system.

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