Toward an Austrian dual-pol radar network—The Austrian TUNDRA project

In 2013 the upgrade of the Austrian weather radar network to dual-polarization technique has been completed. The new data offer a wide range of novel methods for precipitation analyses, monitoring, and nowcasting. But the complexity of the technology, the special Austrian topography with flatland in the East and alpine terrain in the West, and finally the unique characteristic of each radar require a comprehensive data analyses. The FFG-project TUNDRA (Tuning dual-pol radars in the Alps) aims for such a comprehensive analyses of the new data to obtain experience in quality and quality control mechanisms and search for the best possible data processing procedure toward derived precipitation products which satisfies the application requirements of an operational weather surveillance network. It is a cooperation between the Central Institute of Meteorology and Geodynamics (ZAMG) and the radar operator Austro Control GmbH (ACG). Based on a test radar (Rauchenwarth) different approaches from literature as well as self-developed methods are exploited and compared with reference measurements. Based on the findings, a procedure and the necessary software tools for the tuning of the remaining four radars shall be developed. Finally, a road map toward the optimal usage of the new radar network shall be set up. An overview of the developed road map and the status quo of the project will be presented. This includes statistical analyses of the data quality with the testing of different data quality monitoring procedures, such as sun-signal, vertical-scan and ground clutter analyses, and case studies to give an overview of the overall performance.