Three-dimensional high-resolution national radar mosaic

The National Weather Service has implemented an architecture that facilitates the central collection and distribution of base level data in real time from 154 NEXRAD sites to National Climatic Data Center and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction. With this development, the NSSL has implemented a system that produces a national (CONUS) 3D radar mosaic grid with a 1-km horizontal resolution over 21 vertical levels and a 5-minute update cycle. The mosaic system (termed NM2Q for National Mosaic and Multi-sensor QPE) takes base level data from all available radars at any given time, performs quality control, and then combines reflectivity observations from individual radars onto a unified 3D Cartesian frame. The 3D reflectivity grid can be used for multi-sensor severe storm algorithms, regional rainfall products generation, aviation weather applications, and data assimilations for convective scale numerical weather modeling. The infrastructure of the national 3D mosaic and associated products will be presented at the conference.