Initial Operating Capabilities of Quantitative Precipitation Estimation in the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor System

The upcoming operational transition of the Multi-Radar Multi-Sensor (MRMS) System developed at NOAA/NSSL will provide users a large number of severe weather and quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE) products at very high spatial (1km) and temporal (2min) resolution. It integrates operational weather radars from CONUS and Canada and generates a 3-D national radar mosaic every 2 min with 1 km horizontal resolution and 33 vertical levels stretching from 500m to 19km above mean sea level. Advanced polarimetric radar techniques are applied in the system to provide improved qualities of weather products. In addition to radar data, rain gauge and satellite observations as well as numerical weather prediction model data are assimilated in various algorithms of the system. The severe weather products include national composite reflectivity, storm top, hail area and severity, storm rotation tracks, etc. The precipitation products include an ensemble of radar-based QPE, gauge-based QPE, radar-based QPE with a local gauge bias correction and a gauge and orographic precipitation climatology merged QPE.

This paper focuses on the QPE component of the MRMS system, and provides an overview of the corresponding algorithms and end products.