41EIPT Data Quality Anomalies and Phenomena on the WSR-88D

Throughout the operational life of the WSR-88D numerous phenomena and items of interest have been observed in WSR-88D data from wedges of erroneous data, radial spikes, and biological targets to elevation discontinuities, reflections, and wind turbine interference. Many of these provide inaccurate information that can cause confusion among forecasters and operators and even the general public. The majority of these phenomena are consequences of nature, physical constraints of the system, or failure of specific hardware components and have the potential of being present in the data given the right set of circumstances. In this paper, a collection of these anomalies are presented with discussion on the impact to the users of the data.