Maximizing the benefits of adaptive scanning for weather radars: the development of an adaptive weather sensing framework to investigate the effectiveness of task-specific update time assignments

A phased-array radar (PAR) can dynamically control beam position on a pulse-by-pulse basis, which allows a single radar to perform multiple functions without the limitations of mechanically scanned antennas. In this work, we exploit the PAR's multifunction capability for weather sensing, through which tracking of multiple storms and weather surveillance can be carried out independently and adaptively, as a means for better characterization and forecasting of storms of interest. A closed-loop framework for adaptive weather sensing is proposed; it consists of four components: storm identification, storm tracking, task management, and task scheduling. To dynamically schedule multiple competing tasks, the time balance method, which was originally developed for military applications and recently applied to weather observations, is employed. In this work, reflectivity fields observed by operational WSR-88D radars are used to simulate high-temporal-resolution PAR observations in order to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed framework. With these simulations, we can demonstrate that a multifunction PAR can adaptively scan a number of regions of interest (storm cells) with task-specific update times. This can be accomplished with no degradation in data quality and higher-temporal resolution compared to conventional radar, while surveillance is maintained to ensure the tracking of developed storms and the detection of new formations. However, the performance of adaptive weather sensing depends on the requested update time for each task. Hence, simple and intuitive rules for the assignment of update times were developed. In addition, optimal update times were estimated by solving a constrained optimization problem. The performance of the two approaches was statistically evaluated and will be shown and discussed during the presentation.