84th AMS Annual Meeting

Tuesday, 13 January 2004: 8:30 AM
Nexrad Product Improvement—Expanding Science Horizons
Room 613/614
Robert E. Saffle, NOAA/NWS, Silver Spring, MD; and R. C. Elvander and M. J. Istok
Poster PDF (1.4 MB)
The NEXRAD tri-agencies (Department of Commerce, National Weather Service; the Department of Defense, Air Force Weather Agency; the Department of Transportation, Federal Aviation Administration) have established the NEXRAD Product Improvement (NPI) Program as a long-term activity to steadily improve WSR-88D science and technology. The Radar Product Generation subsystem has been replaced with open systems compliant software and hardware (ORPG), and a similar effort to replace the Radar Data Acquisition subsystem (ORDA) is nearing initial deployment. With these system upgrades, and the deployment of dual polarization capability in a few years, there will be a vast increase in the potential to improve warnings and forecasts with new scientific applications and signal processing techniques. Further, the NWS is currently also working on integration of weather data from several FAA radar systems into forecast office operations. This paper summarizes recent scientific and technical improvements, and explores the expanding opportunities for further development.

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