87th AMS Annual Meeting

Thursday, 18 January 2007: 12:00 AM
Dynamic and adaptive steering of CASA radar network
217A (Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center)
Gang Xu, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO; and V. Chandrasekar
Tracking of storms based on the extrapolation of their tracks from radar reflectivity is highly valuable for the 0 – 1 hr nowcasting of storms. Such type of nowcast will also provide the basis for anticipating the movement and development of hazardous weather, and this information can be fed back to the radar system for adaptively determining its next-step operational strategy. It is the second type of the use of nowcasting that forms a closed-loop system in the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) project. This closed-loop procedure for the adaptive sensing system requires an efficient and robust approach for real-time storm tracking. We present an efficient new algorithm for estimating the motion field of storms from radar measurement. It is a radar field based algorithm in the sense that it does not employ local block windows and the estimated motion field can be constructed over the whole spatial region where radar images are rendered. The numerical implementation of the new algorithm is computationally efficient and meant for real time application. The performance of the new approach developed here is evaluated by comparing its prediction skills with those of state-of-the-art algorithm, namely, the “Growth-Decay Storm Tracker” (GDST) algorithm developed at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory.

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