New WSR-88D Operational Techniques: Responding to Recent Weather Events

As the NEXRAD program hardware components and software capabilities continue to evolve, the computing speed and software flexibility allow for more innovative data collection and analysis techniques not possible only a few years ago. This evolution in data processing capacity has opened the door for a revolution in WSR-88D severe weather operations support capabilities. The venue for development is through the Radar Operations Center (ROC) Innovative Techniques Working Group (ITWG) whose role is to provide new, innovative scanning and data collection techniques, designed to overcome shortcomings identified during recent severe weather episodes. These advancements are leading a paradigm shift away from the standard methodical volume scanning scheme towards using dynamic scanning techniques that have the ability to adapt as the meteorological conditions change.

This paper will present an overview of the new data collection and scanning techniques, specifically designed to address operational needs identified during recent severe weather events that are being implemented by the ROC (e.g., Supplemental Adaptive Intra-volume Low-level Scan [SAILS] and Storm-Based Auto PRF).