An Update on the MRMS Product Suite for the Transportation Sector

Four years ago, a new suite within the MRMS system that is designed to provide enhanced decision support for the transportation sector was introduced. In this presentation, an update of the activities particular to that product suite will be provided. New products are categorized into three categories: convective/warm season tools, winter weather tools, and general improvements to radar techniques. The convective/warm season products include five new composite reflectivities computed over the flight layers used for the TCF, a new ZDR-column detection algorithm, a three-dimensional hail diagnostic, and automated detection of convective sigmets in both the full 3D volume and for specific flight layers. The winter suite focuses primarily on hydrometeor phase diagnoses using both dual polarized radar observations and NWP thermal profiles as input to a spectral-bin-based classification algorithm. The suite also includes a large-drop icing tool that makes use of the three-dimensional radar mosaics. Last, the radar techniques grouping includes improvements to the quality control to more effectively discriminate weak, cold season precipitation from clutter and mosaics to quantify both the latency and beam width of each pixel in the 3D mosaic.