Approaches for Compression of Phased-Array Weather Radar Data

Phased array weather radar is the next generation of weatherradar trends. With polarimetric upgrades to weather radars, the amount of data to be processed and transmitted has increased. The transmission and storageof phased array weather radar products will be an important problem forfuture weather radar applications. The aim of this work is to provide a solution for real-time transmission of phased array weather radar base dataand efficient data storage. A compression approach is proposed to reduce theamount of data for transmission and archiving. General-purpose compression programs are inefficient to phased array weather radar data because the characteristics of phased array weather radar data is not taken into account. The characteristics of phased array weather radar data are analyzed and compared with the single polarization radar. A lossless compression of phased array weather radar base data is presented, which is called phased arrayradar data compression (PARDC). The correlations in radials and volumes areutilized to improve the compression ratio. A specific prediction scheme forphased array weather radar data is given, while the residual data and motion vectors are used to replace the original values for entropy coding. After this, the Level-II product from phased array is used to evaluate PARDC performance. Experimental results show that the PARDC effectively compresses phased array radar base data and is able to achieve a better performance than general-purpose compression programs.