Approaches for Compression of Dual-Polarization Weather Radar Data

Dual-polarization Doppler weather radar is the next generation of weather radar trends. The amount of weather radar data to be processed and transmitted continues to increase with the polarimetric upgrades to weather radar. The transmission and storage of dual-polarization weather radar products will be an important problem for future weather radar applications. The aim of this work is to provide a solution for real-time transmission of dual-polarization weather radar base data and efficient data storage. A compression approach is proposed to reduce the amount of data for transmission and archiving. General-purpose compression programs are inefficient to dual-polarization weather radar data because the characteristics of weather radar data are not considered. The characteristics of dual-polarization weather radar data are analyzed and compared with the single polarization radar. A lossless compression of dual polarization weather radar base data is presented, which is called dual-polarization radar data compression (DPRDC). The correlations in radials and volumes are utilized to improve the compression ratio. A specific prediction scheme for dual-polarization 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 CSU-CHILL is used to evaluate DPRDC performance. Experimental results show that the DPRDC effectively compresses dual-polarization radar base data and achieves a better performance than general-purpose compression programs.