The advent of internet-2 and effective compression techniques facilitates the transmission of the full base level radar data from NEXRAD network economically and in real time as demonstrated by the CRAFT (The Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test, Droegemeier et al., 2000) network. The result is the ability to integrate the full resolution multiple radar data into a single framework at high-resolution time and space scales.

The integration of multiple radar data is very useful for the National Weather Service (NWS) and for aviation communities. Many NWS county warning areas (CWA) span multiple radar umbrellas. The ARTCCs (Air Route Traffic Control Centers) of FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) cover even larger area than the CWAs. Further, weather systems often extend over multiple radar coverage. All these make strong suggestions for bring multiple radar data onto a common grid (Zhang et al., 2001).

Due to the spherical coordinates of WSR-88D radar data sampling system, the data resolution is unique and extremely non-uniform in space. Combining this non-uniformity with largely different spatial scales of various weather systems, objective analysis of radar data onto a uniform Cartesian grid is very challenging. In this paper authors will present various objective analysis methods applied to WSR-88D data for different weather regimes. These include comparisons of radar bin volume mapping, beam spreading, linear interpolation for gridding and nearest neighbor, maximum value, and distance weighted mean techniques for mosaicking. Results from comparisons of different applications will be shown at the conference.

Reference:

Droegemeier, K.K., K. Kelleher, T. D. Crum, J. Levit, S. A. DelGreco, L. Miller, C. Sinclair, M. Benner, S.W. Fulker, and H. Edmon: Project CRAFT: A test bed for demonstrating the real time acquisition and archival of WSR-88D Level II Data, Preprints, 18th IIPS, Orlando, FL, Amer. Meteor. Soc., 136-139.

Zhang, J.,J. J. Gourley, K. Howard, B. Maddox, 2001: Three-dimensional gridding and mosaic of reflectivities from multiple WSR-88D radars. Preprints, The 30th International Radar Conference, July 19-24, Munich, Germany, 719-721.