87th AMS Annual Meeting

Monday, 15 January 2007: 12:00 AM
Warning Decision Support System – integrated information based severe weather feature extraction and analysis from NEXRAD radar (WSR-88D) Archived Data at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center
217A (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Steve Ansari, NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC, Asheville, NC; and C. Hutchins
NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) archives Weather Surveillance Radar, 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) data from the national network of ~160 National Weather Service, Department of Defense and Federal Aviation Administration sites. These are commonly referred to as Next-Generation Doppler Radars (NEXRAD). The NCDC NEXRAD Archive contains over 1000 terabytes of volume scan data and derived products. Several of the products in the NEXRAD data stream are point features describing general storm structure, hail, mesocyclone, and tornado signatures. The Warning Decision Support System – Integrated Information (WDSS-II), developed at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and the Cooperative Institute for Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS), is used to reprocess historical Level-II data and extract severe weather features based on current algorithms. Within WDSS-II, there are two different types of storm cell identification algorithms which may be applied. One algorithm processes data from a single NEXRAD site, while the other processes data from a 3-dimensional product derived from multiple NEXRAD sites. The two WDSS-II algorithms and NEXRAD severe weather data products are compared based upon several criteria including types of data produced and accuracy of data based on case study verification. The severe weather features are loaded into the NCDC Severe Weather Data Inventory which provides interactive mapping and web service access methods in addition to export capability in formats such as plain text, XML, NetCDF, and Shapefile.

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