A Radar-Based Storm Rotation Climatology for the CONUS (2000–2011)

The National Severe Storms Laboratory and National Climatic Data Center have partnered the past 2 years to reprocess all of the WSR-88D data through the Warning Decision Support System—Integrated Information (WDSS-II) software suite to produce merged composite layers (0-3 km AGL and 3-6 km AGL) of azimuthal shear calculated by a linear least squares derivatives technique. The merged composite layers are on a latitude-longitude grid with 0.01 degree spacing. This presentation will focus primarily on the lower composite layer. The quality control process of the data and the generation of a storm rotation climatology will be described. Discussions on further applications—such as regions where rotating storms produce a majority of severe weather reports and comparisons to Storm Data will also be included.