The NOAA Joint Radar Planning Team's Strategic Vision for 2025: An Integrated National Weather Radar System

In 2006 NOAA formed the Joint Radar Planning Team (JRPT) with a mandate to provide coordinated input to its annual planning process and to create a strategic vision for 2025. This vision challenges convention and sets ambitious goals: Neighborhood-scale, probabilistic warnings of (i) high impact weather including a 45± minute tornado lead time; (ii) improvements in QPF, increasing flash flood lead time from 1 to 3 hours; (iii) a four-fold improvement in QPE (reducing in-rain bias from 4 mm to 1 mm). The JRPT believes that this vision can be realized through the integration of surveillance and short wavelength gap-filling radars, and other sensors sampling the boundary layer, that cumulatively drive regional integrated cloud-scale models and intelligent adaptive systems. These three goals are illustrative and map onto NOAA's Weather and Water themes of High Impact Weather, Hurricanes and Inundation and Drought and Water Resources, which facilitates the annual planning process. In this paper we elaborate upon this plan and discuss a roadmap which includes a timeline of the key decision points.