Quantifying and Visualizing the “Completeness” of the WSR-88D Archive for Severe Weather Events

A joint effort between the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the National Center for Environmental Information, the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, and the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites to process the WSR-88D archive through the Multi-Radar, Multi-Sensor Framework is nearing completion.  This effort is known as the Multi-Year Reanalysis for Remotely Sensed Storms (MYRORSS).  The years 2000 through 2011 have been processed and CIMMS/NSSL is nearly finished manually quality controlling days with severe radar data quality degradation that were not corrected properly by an automated algorithm.  The MYRORSS data set could be used for a number of research goals, with the development of radar-based severe storm hazard climatologies being a primary first step in using the data.  However, over time, the WSR-88D archive and the radar system itself have undergone many changes that impact data availability and completeness.  This presentation will focus on quantifying and visualizing the completeness of the record.  Records from the MYRORSS database will be compared to storm reports and archived lightning data to evaluate the overall completeness.  Different visualizations for temporal and spatial completeness will also be explored.