Enhancing the foundational data from the WSR-88D: Part I, A history of success

Since 1993, the Radar Operations Center (ROC) has had a joint agreement with the National Severe Storms Lab (NSSL) and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) for the purpose of improving the foundational radar data quality. This agreement, referred to as the Data Quality Memorandum of Understanding (DQ MOU), has focused on the transition of new science research to operations, and has resulted in many significant improvements. This paper will provide an overview of the past successes and current efforts. The past successes include the development of capturing and utilizing time series data, validating an improved clutter filter that was part of the Open Radar Data Acquisition (ORDA) upgrade, the first range velocity mitigation algorithm using phase encoding, and a clutter detection algorithm that detects anomalous propagation induced clutter in addition to ground clutter. Some of the current efforts addressed in this paper are a second range velocity mitigation effort utilizing staggered pulse repetition frequencies, a method to validate differential reflectivity calibration, improved spectrum width calculations, and continued improvements to the clutter detection algorithm.