Networking weather radars in Cuba: a change in paradigm

Cuban Institute of Meteorology operates 8 weather radars. Seven of them are old (from the 1970-80) in-house revamped radars, plus a new modern Doppler radar. Taking into account that the main island of the Cuban archipelago is 110 thousand km2 in area, it’s easy to understand that our radar network guarantees excellent overlapped surveillance coverage, and even a good precipitation-measurement coverage. This allowed us migrate from a conception based on images centered on the radar, to images centered on objects of interest (cities, airports, water basins). Mosaicking data from different radars allows users (non-experienced in radar information) to be concerned only with the meteorological information integrated on those images. There is an additional advantage of having some radars (more than one) looking to the same area, which is, that this redundancy covers the eventual absence for maintenance or failure, of some of the radars. Of course, traditional radar-centered images are also available. Information coming from different radars is easily corrected in Reflectivity, by means of software utilities, in such a way to keep them calibrated relatively between themselves. Archive, data processing and data dissemination is provided on the Radar Center in Camagüey. Radar information is also integrated with satellite and surface information and is made available in a Web page for internal use of Cuban Institute of Meteorology. Images from all modernized radars are routinely available at www.insmet.cu for all users.