NEXRAD Radar Product Improvement – Update 2020

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 builds containing the approved research to operations improvements. These include new scan strategies, improvements to base data quality, and upgrades to the suite of radar-meteorological algorithms. The NWS also updates systems developed to utilize weather data from the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR).

This paper will describe recent and near term planned capability improvements to these weather radar functional areas, and will provide an update on longer term radar improvement projects.