Weather radar data services at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center

NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) is responsible for acquisition, archive, and dissemination services for weather radar data products and information from both civilian and military radar systems. The primary radar data products archived at NCDC are part of the Weather Surveillance Radar 1988 Doppler network, commonly known as Next Generation Radar (NEXRAD). There are 159 NEXRAD sites throughout the United States and selected overseas locations. NCDC also archives Environment Canada radar data from 31 sites across Canada and recently 45 weather radar sites from the U.S. Department of Transportation known as Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR). Data ingest for the radar networks mentioned above are in near real time and over one petabyte of data resides in the archive. NCDC provide web services for direct access to these data. In addition, NCDC provides a free software application, The Weather and Climate Toolkit (WCT), for data display and translation. The WCT allows visualization and data export of weather and climate data from unique sources such as Radar, GOES Satellite and Models as well as generic NetCDF and OPeNDAP resources. This paper describes in detail all weather radar services available at NOAA's NCDC.