Creating a Climatological Database of Three-Dimensional Radar Mosaics with Derived Severe Weather Products: Progress, Challenges, and Moving Forward

In 2012 a partnered effort called the Multi-Year Reanalysis of Remotely Sensed Storms (MYRORSS) between the Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorological Studies, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites—North Carolina, and the National Center for Environmental Information, began to process the WSR-88D archive through the Warning Decision Support System—Integrated Information software suite in order produce three-dimensional mosaics and derived severe weather products. This framework operationally is known as the Multi-Radar, Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system and is generated on a 0.01x0.01-degree horizontal grid that covers the CONUS with 35 vertical levels stretched from 250 m MSL to 20 km MSL at a 5-minute frequency. Currently, the MYRORSS project has completed reflectivity and reflectivity-derived products from 2000-2011, with the processing of Doppler velocity-derived products currently ongoing. Primary challenges in processing the entire record of the WSR-88D archive are due to both corrupted data and quality controlling of the raw Level-II data. The quality control problem is the primary focus of potential future work since numerous changes to the WSR-88D system have occurred since the radar network became operational, including upgrades of radar hardware, and changes in sampling—both in data resolution and volume coverage patterns. Additionally, decisions in the radar quality control software may remove features of interest to parties outside the severe storms community (e.g., biological researchers), presenting a challenge to potentially producing a catch-all climatological radar database. This presentation will summarize the processing challenges and progress to date. Summaries of ongoing work using the MYRORSS dataset will be provided. Discussions on challenges using the derived data and limitations of the data will be included. Future work, including potential decisions increasing temporal frequency, quality control, and output products, will also be discussed.