Radar data collection considerations for the Cuban Weather Radar Network

Weather radars produce a huge amount of information caused by its spatial and time variability. Despite the advent of fast digitizers and relatively low-cost/high-performance computers, the available computing power is not enough to deal with the information size that we can get at an affordable price. So, unavoidably, we have to make some compromise, sacrificing resolution.

It has been a common practice to get one sample per beam width (generally around 1 degree) and one sample per kilometer, sacrificing resolution even more than it’s actually needed according to current available computing power. Different constrains are applied to data acquisition according to different applications requirements. But at the acquisition time, making a compromise, we give prevailing weight to some application at the expense of others.

The solution of the dilemma Accuracy versus Space-Time Resolution is always in the center of the problem. In this work we present the VESTA multiformat file structure, which is an attempt to give a flexible solution to the subject.