Over the past year, NSSL has collected several Doppler radar data sets from the KOUN radar. These data sets are comprised of standard Doppler moment (Archive Level II) and time series (Archive Level I) data. Goals of these new and expanded data collection activities are to gain a better understanding of certain weather phenomena and radar data quality issues and apply this knowledge to the development of new and better meteorological and data quality algorithms.

Currently, all operational meteorological algorithms in the WSR-88D process moment data. However, a great deal of useful information is also available in the time series data. Processing of time series data in real-time has been somewhat limited due to computational constraints of the WSR-88D. This has been overcome with advances in the computational capacity of modern day processors.

Research is underway at NSSL to analyze moment data and power spectra calculated from the time series data, seeking spectral signatures that could be useful in improving the detection of certain meteorological phenomena (i.e., tornadoes) and radar data artifacts (i.e. ground clutter, AP, biological targets).

This paper describes a new software tool developed at NSSL called the Research Radar Data Analysis Tool (RRAT). This tool provides an interactive mechanism that visualizes and links moment and time series spectra for selected gates which should help in the process of identifying spectral signatures which in turn aid in the development of new and better meteorological and data quality algorithms.