Keynote Talk: Operational Applications of Polarimetric Radar

With the future upgrade of the NEXRAD radar network to dual-polarization capabilities, comes a host of exciting opportunities including improved radar data quality, improved rainfall estimation, better detection of hail and other severe weather situations, mitigation of attenuation, and discrimination of meteorological from non-meteorological echo. Today, polarimetric radars, when combined with Doppler capabilities, provide a powerful technique for studying the dynamics and microphysics of precipitating clouds. As a community, we have access to several S-band polarimetric radars, C-and X-band systems, as well as mm-wave polarized radars.

In this talk we will first develop the unique measurement suite provided by a polarized radar such as differential reflectivity and differential phase, then describe applications of these systems for the study of convective and mesoscale processes through recent field programs. Rainfall and hydrometeor detection algorithms using polarized radars will be reviewed, and applications presented to demonstrate the capabilities of these algorithms for hydrological applications. The application of polarized radars to estimating cool season precipitation is a relatively unexplored area that is deserving of more research, especially using short wavelength polarized radars.

A view will be offered for the future when the NWS S-band polarized radars are expected to come on line.