Integration of Hail Sensor Data with CASA DFW Weather Radar System Using CHORDS

Advances in sensing, hardware, and wireless communications are allowing for an ever-increasing array of previously unmeasured weather phenomena at large scales. Integrating these new data with existing technologies and paradigms is of tantamount importance, in order to be able to respond quickly to emerging weather phenomena such as flash floods, tornadoes, and hailstorms in real-time. The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm can aid in this issue. With internet-enabled sensors ranging from rain gauges, hail sensors, radar, UAV, and user-reporting via smartphone apps, a great opportunity exists for real-time data analysis and visualization. Currently, no research system exists that integrates data from these various sources. This paper presents a solution to this problem and presents a system to integrate networked X-band radar data from the CASA Dallas-Fort Worth urban test bed and Understory hail and weather sensors, using the Cloud-Hosted Real-time Data Services (CHORDS) as a cloud solution to facilitate aligning and visualizing of the complicated data space. CHORDS is a real-time data services infrastructure that allows instrument teams to transmit, store, and visualize data from any internet-enabled sensor, employing data and metadata formats adhering to community accepted standards. This paper will show several examples of integrating 130 hail sensors with the DFW radar network, and illustrate how the system can be utilized for data validation, focusing specifically on several hailstorm events in Spring and Summer 2017.