Radar Climatology for the Camaguey’s region. A comparison between manually digitized and digitally recorded data

Not so much attention has been paid to Radar Climatology, maybe because the manual digitization was a high time consuming task, or maybe because operational applications to hydrology and storm forecasting are more attractive. With the advent of digital recorded data and automated radar operation, new very promising perspectives are opened. In 1981, there was installed the first MRL-5 in Cuba, in the area of the Meteorological Center of Camaguey. In 1997, this old radar was replaced with a new MRL-5, but it was modernized to get unmanned operation and digital data processing and archiving. This radar (called MRL-5M) served as a prototype for the modernization of the rest of the network.

In this work, we present some climatological features obtained from 5 years of manually digitized data from the old MRL-5 and we compare them with the same features obtained from 3 years of digitally recorded data from the new MRL-5M.

The work emphasizes the importance of Radar Climatology in the understanding of the atmospheric processes and in the use of it as a forecasting tool.