Operational utilisation of polarimetric C-Band weather radar measurements at Deutscher Wetterdienst: The Project "Radarmassnahmen"

Weather radar measurements with high temporal- and spatial resolution play an increasingly important role for weather nowcasting, forecasting and warning management processes within the weather services. With the current replacement of its operational C-Band Doppler radar network by polarimetric C-Band Doppler radar systems, the Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD) is able to operationally utilise the potential of polarimetric weather radar measurements. Therefore, the DWD has initiated the project "Radarmassnahmen" with the aim to operationally implement (polarimetric) methods for data quality assurance, hydrometeor classification and quantitative precipitation estimation. All together should be based on a common software development framework (POLARA "Polarimetric Radar Algorithms"). POLARA is currently in a pre-operational test phase and will be operational in 2014. This paper shall give an overview to the project, starting with the user's needs which lead to the project main tasks, the concept to realise these tasks and the required efforts for operationalisation. Thereby, the software framework POLARA will be presented more detailed, as it has the potential to greatly optimise the radar algorithm development sequence, the operationalisation process and the method operation, in order to have a consistent operational chain of weather radar algorithms at the DWD.