Symbiosis of Phased-array and Reflector Dish Radars in Meteorological Research

Present-day phased-array and rotating dish meteorological research radars possess complementary characteristics which, when brought together into collaborative operational schemes, offer unique opportunities to gain insights into meteorological phenomena, ranging from winter weather to deep convection. The collocated Ka-Band polarimetric scanning cloud radar and X-Band phased-array radars located at the Stony Brook University and Brookhaven National Laboratory Radar Observatory (SBRO) on Long Island, NY provide a unique testbed to explore these synergies. Over the past year we have run our Saccadic Phased Array Radar Sampling (SPARS) algorithm under a variety of weather conditions. The SPARS algorithm performs simultaneous surveillance, targeting, and tracking of interesting features by emulating the saccadic and smooth pursuit eye movement mechanisms of human vision. This results in an environmentally driven plasticity of attention targeting consistently relevant, rapidly evolving, and often multiple, meteorological features. When coupled as the driver controlling the azimuthal positioning of vertical cuts performed by our scanning dish cloud radar, the beneficial outcomes are significantly amplified, as the dish radar spends most of its time sampling interesting targets. During the summer months, we include lightning strikes, reported every twenty seconds by the GOES-16 Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), as an additional, high priority target feature for the scanning cloud radar. With the advent of these collaborative observational schemes, under the umbrella of Multisensor Agile Adaptive Sampling (MAAS), advanced observations of features such as the electrostatic charge distribution in thunderstorms inferred from high quality polarimetry, once serendipitous and infrequent, are now routine. Here, we present examples of the symbiotic use of PARs and reflector-based radars for the study of convective weather conditions.