Utilizing TITAN Software for Hail Analysis to Aid in Mission Guidance

Mission guidance for cloud seeding operations and airborne convective storm research can be immensely aided by using hail metrics and signals in radar reflectivity data. In order to provide this guidance to pilots, meteorologists must use appropriate software that would track the air-craft's location and motion as well as provide timely radar reflectivity data, hail metrics, hail in-dices, and dual-pol variables. TITAN (Thunderstorm Identifying, Tracking, Analysis, and Now-casting) is a software suite that would fit this purpose. It was developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research that can ingest real-time radar data including WSR-88D and research radar platforms.

In this analysis, case studies of storms near WSR-88D radars in the state of South Dakota and the CSU-CHILL research radar in Greeley, CO will be displayed using the TITAN software suite. Each storm will be analyzed using a rubric of hail metrics including probability of hail (POH), hail mass, Foote-Krauss (FOKR) index, vertically integrated hail mass, 3 body scatter spikes, bounded weak echo regions, and dual-polarization radar measurements (ZDR, KDP, and ZH). Spe-cifically, the hail rubric will be used to find areas of hazardous flying conditions, hail, icing, and storm development to aid meteorologists and pilots to coordinate for mission decision support. Finally, a comparison will be made between the different variables of the rubric to see conditions in which they agree or disagree on hail content of a storm. Verification of the hail content will be made using National Weather Service storm reports.