NEXRAD Radar Product Improvement—Update 2019

The NEXRAD tri-agencies (Department of Commerce, National Weather Service (NWS); the Department of Defense, Air Force Weather; the Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)) continue to support a long-term activity to steadily improve the science and technology of the WSR-88D. Research and development 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 Radar Operations Center periodically releases WSR-88D software updates containing improvements to scan strategies, the base data, and to the suite of radar-meteorological algorithms. The NWS also updates systems developed to utilize weather data from supplemental radars such as the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR), the Airport Surveillance Radar: Model 11 (ASR-11), and the Air Route Surveillance Radar: Model 4 (ARSR-4).

This paper will describe recent and near term planned capability improvements to these weather radar systems and will provide a status update on longer term radar improvement projects.