NEXRAD Radar Product Improvement -- Update 2025

The Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) program tri-agencies (Department of Commerce, National Weather Service (NWS); the Department of Defense, United States Air Force (USAF); the Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)) continue to support a long-term activity to steadily improve the science and technology of the Weather Surveillance Radar - 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D). Research and development (R&D) is focused on improving the bias, variance, and coverage of the base data; the performance of clutter filtering; and the radar meteorological algorithms. The NEXRAD program relies on research partners to conduct R&D and follows a methodological process to integrate new capabilities into the operational baseline.

The NEXRAD Radar Operations Center annually releases WSR-88D software builds containing the approved research to operations improvements. These include new scan strategies, improvements to base data quality, and enhancements to the suite of radar-meteorological algorithms.

This paper will describe recent and near term planned improvements to these weather radar functional areas, and will provide an update on longer term radar improvement projects.