WEATHER RADAR DATA SERVICES AT NOAA'S NATIONAL CENTERS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION

NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) 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 NCEI 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. NCEI also archives radar data from Environment Canada for 31 sites across Canada and from 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 is in near real time and 3 petabytes (uncompressed) of data resides in the archive. NCEI provides web services for direct access to these data. In addition, the web page has a Weather and Climate Toolkit (WCT) available for data display. The WCT is free software and allows the visualization and data export of weather and climate data (radar, GOES satellite, model, in-situ data). In addition, the WCT provides access to remote web services for access to products such as the Drought Monitor, NEXRAD reflectivity mosaics, and multisensory precipitation totals. This paper describes in detail all weather radar services available at NOAA's NCEI.