Radar based applications of a Nowcast Decision Support System

Weather Decision Technologies (WDT) has integrated state-of-the-science nowcasting technologies from McGill University, the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), and those developed by WDT to provide a complete nowcasting system. This Nowcast Decision Support System (NDSS) ingests multiple data sources to provide users with meteorological and hydrological applications with both workstation and Web based displays. A large component of NDSS includes radar based applications. WDT has setup a central processing facility to integrate, process, and serve results using Level II data from all WSR-88Ds across the continental US. Radar based components of the NDSS provide detections and short-term predictions of weather phenomena such as storm movement and evolution, hail, lightning, damaging winds, precipitation accumulation, and storm-scale circulations. Additional algorithms provide GIS based asset monitoring to alert users of impending arrival and departures of hazardous weather phenomena. This paper will discuss the implementation of the radar based components of the NDSS.