Description:

Weather radar is positioned to benefit from phased array radar (PAR) technology. With both Doppler, polarimetric, and agile scanning capabilities, PAR provides rapid updates of quickly evolving severe weather with greater spatial coverage compared with the reflector-based weather radar worldwide. Both the engineering and the meteorological communities have converged that the adoption of PARs has the potential to revolutionize how atmosphere is observed by radars and advance science and engineering frontiers (Palmer et al. 2021; Kollias et al. 2021).

NOAA developed a full scale, S-band, polarimetric, Advanced Technology Demonstrator (ATD) for evaluating the feasibility of PAR as a potential next generation radar system in the United States. The completion of fully digital, S-band, polarimetric, truck-mounted PARs, HORUS, (University of Oklahoma) have provided new insights into the rapid evolution of many high-impacts weather events such as supercells and squall lines. NSF’s decision to fund the develop an airborne PAR system (the Airborne Phased array radar, APAR, NCAR) will provide unprecedented concurrent 3-D winds and dual-pol/microphysics information within mesoscale convective systems over the open ocean serving as the building blocks of the earth’s climate systems (e.g., tropical cyclones, MJO, etc.). In addition, ground-based, gap filling, X-band PAR radar networks have been developed and installed in urban areas in Shanghai, China, and Osaka Japan.

The multi-discipline nature of the PAR research includes design of transmit/receive semiconductor chips, radar waveform design, radar signal processing, radar data quality control, and radar data analysis methodology. The rapid update capability of PARs has opened the door for assimilating of Doppler velocity into numerical models. One of the remaining challenges is to assimilate dual-pol data into numerical models. It is anticipated that integration of observations and numerical models will accelerate the validation and improvement of the microphysical parameterization schemes for better prediction of high-impact weather events.

In light of these exciting development activities of PARs and the potential for ground-breaking science discoveries and applications in improving weather prediction, it is timely to propose a PAR symposium at the AMS Annual Meeting to inform the broader AMS community on the current research and development activities on PAR. The primary goal of this symposium is to entrain and engage more AMS members into this exciting new technology and research opportunities to tackle future science and engineering frontiers.

The organizing committee members includes professors and researchers in leading PAR research institutions such as University of Oklahoma, Colorado State University, Stony Brook University, University of Massachusetts, National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Ball Aerospace (now BAE). Currently, the organizing group consists of senior professors and researchers. If this symposium is approved, it is the intent to entrain earlier career professors and researchers into the organizing committee in future years.

Two BAMS articles:

Palmer, R. , and Coauthors, 2022: A primer on phased array radar technology for the atmospheric sciences. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 103, https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0172.1.

Kollias, P., and Coauthors, 2022: Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. 103, 10, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-21-0173.1