Four-dimensional dynamic radar mosaic

In addition to the issuance of severe weather warnings, the aviation community and electrical power commercial sector have a need for rapidly updating WSR-88D radar data spanning across regions in a seamless mosaiced network. The development of a rapidly updating network of radars requires communication and computation logic that incorporates the operational nuisances of WSR-88D. Early radar mosaic products, mainly in 2-D and with just 16 data levels, have provided users a useful tool to monitor weather systems in a regional and national domain. Recently, 3-D multiple radar mosaics were developed for convective numerical weather prediction models’ data assimilation and for other applications. To accommodate the fastest update cycle possible in radar observations across a region, a 4-D dynamic radar mosaic is currently in development at the National Severe Storms Lab. The 4-D dynamic mosaic is a 3-D grid that updates whenever a new tilt of data becomes available from any radar that covers the analysis domain. For a domain with 10 radars running VCP11, the update rate can be as high as every 3 seconds. The higher update frequency can assist towards improving lead and response times for severe weather identification. The algorithm and preliminary results will be presented at the conference.