87th AMS Annual Meeting

Tuesday, 16 January 2007: 2:30 PM
Use of the Management Information and Retrieval System to Generate RADAR Beam Coverage Maps
217A (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Joseph Facundo, NOAA/NWS, Silver Spring, MD; and M. Carelli
Poster PDF (2.2 MB)
The Management Information Retrieval System (MIRS) has been developed by the National Weather Service to represent its metadata using a Geographical Information System interface. Information is provided to you in the form of reports, maps, charts, files, and other means through a web portal, or “Kiosk.” This extended abstract will describe the technique developed by Mr. Robert Saffle and Dr. Scot Shipley used to portray radar coverage areas for either an operational or theoretical radar beam as it sweeps the surrounding topography at different elevation angles. The results of their technique was then superimposed on 30-meter high-resolution terrain mapping to depict visual coverage areas and determine if the radar beam at different elevation angles was consistent with the terrain. There are a number of applications for using these GIS maps which will be discussed in the paper. For example if the radar is situated on a mountaintop and pointed downward, say -0.5 degrees, what would the footprint be on the land surface? Another example is when moving a radar from point A to point B, what happens to the aerial coverage at say 10,000 ft?

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