The Research and Educational Activities with the Mobile Rapid Scan X-Band Polarimetric (RaXPol) Radar As an NSF Community Instrument Facility

Mobile weather radars can gain an increased chance to observe storms of interests and provide better spatial resolution by getting closer to the storm, compared to fixed-site radars. The Rapid scan X-band polarimetric (RaXPol) radar further provides fast update time of 20 seconds for a volume of 10 elevation angles with high fidelity polarimetric data by using advanced techniques of frequency hopping or pulse compression. The high spatial-temporal resolution has enabled many scientific discoveries in supercells and tornadoes, hailstorms, cloud electrification, etc. Its mobility also offers the flexibility to travel to different institutions to promote radar science and engineering. RaXPol recently became a part of National Science Foundation’s deployment instrument pool through the Community Instrumentation and Facilities (CIF) program with the goal to serve a wider community for research, education, and outreach activities. In this presentation, we will focus on one of the unique educational activities, in collaboration with the University of Florida (UF), Gainesville, for three weeks in September 2022. The central part of educational activities is the virtual experiments with RaXPol by exploiting its remotely control capability and data availability via RadarHub in both real-time and archived modes. 50 participants across 11 institutions operated RaXPol remotely for data collection and analysis over multiple days with the support of graduate students from UF and the University of Oklahoma. Before the RaxPol visit and preparing for the virtual experiment, a student-led virtual workshop was designed to brainstorm the scientific merits gained by radar observations with the focus on sea breeze thunderstorms and identify appropriate radar scanning modes that leverage RaXPol’s rapid-scan capabilities. Over 90 undergraduate, graduate students and postdocs from 25 institutions participated. Lessons learned from the virtual workshop and experiment have been shared, including student feedback on the strengths and weaknesses of the virtual experiences. One of the deployments during the UF visit for sea breeze observations is shown in the following photograph. Moreover, RaXPol has supported a wide range of field experiments such as NASA’s Investigation of Microphysics and Precipitation for Atlantic Coast-Threatening Snowstorms (IMPACTS) project in 2022 and 2023, NSF’s Experiment of Sea Breeze Convection, Aerosols, Precipitation, and Environment (ESCAPE) project in 2022, NOAA and NSF’s Propagation, Evolution, and Rotation in Linear Storms (PERiLS) project in 2022 and 2023, etc. Highlights from some of these field campaigns will be presented.

link to the figure: https://www.dropbox.com/s/xeo33r41zbcn2dx/RaXPol.jpg?dl=0