Development of a Hydrometeor Classifier for the Met Office C-Band Weather Radar Network

The Met Office has recently developed and installed a network of dual-polarisation C-band weather radars in the United Kingdom. The dual-polarisation data is already used operationally for non-hydrometeor identification, attenuation correction and quantitative precipitation estimation.

Work is now underway to develop, test and validate a hydrometeor classifier, which is optimised for the UK weather conditions and designed to meet a wide range of user requirements. These include a desire to produce a classifier which is independent of numerical weather prediction model temperature information, in order that it may be used in the Met Office Operations Centre to provide real-time guidance on model performance.

This poster describes and illustrates the progress made with hydrometeor classifier development, which is building on existing fuzzy-logic schemes which have been running operationally elsewhere for a number of years. Membership function shapes have been established using data from a large number subjectively identified areas of unambiguous hydrometeor type. Algorithm performance is illustrated via a number of convective and stratiform events, and with the radar scanning in both plan-position and range-height mode.