A CASA-like Networked Radar System in Nanjing Area

Motivated by the CASA Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) Urban Demonstration Network (Philips and Chandrasekar 2012; Chandrasekar et al. 2013; Chen and Chandrasekar 2014; Chen and Chandrasekar 2015), an X-band radar network is deployed in Nanjing area, China, to provide high-resolution observations for urban disaster mitigations. This quasi-CASA radar network consists of four X-band weather radars which are spaced approximately 40 km apart from each other. The network control center is located in Jiangning district of Nanjing, and the meteorological command is transferred through wireless network. Main research topics include multi-Doppler wind retrieval, quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) and quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF). The existing remote sensors such as national weather service radar will also be used for creating multi-sensor based products. This paper will first present an overview of the deployment of this radar network. The system's main control loop will then be described in details, including the identification of the area of interesting (AOI) according to the end users' needs, transmission of the AOI information to the control center, as well as the determination of each radar's future scan strategy. In addition, recent field observations will be presented to demonstrate the capability of this network for urban weather hazards monitoring.