The Meteorological Service of Canada is implementing a network of thirty Doppler radars. The radar processing software is designed to address many needs. The most recent version of the software addresses the needs of the summer severe weather forecaster. The requirements of the software are demanding. The forecaster is responsible for providing severe weather warnings typically encompassing an area of four to eight radars. So the forecaster must be able to maintain a broad view of the weather while at the same time able to focus on individual thunderstorms. In addition, the type of severe weather across the country is quite varied.

The concept that has been developed involves using multi-layered high resolution (1 km per pixel) multi-radar (composite) imagery as a basic tool to monitor the weather. Multi-layer imagery refers to a dsiplay where several radar products such as the CAPPI, cell location and Echo Top are overlaid and displayed. From this multi-radar image, the forecaster is able to "drill down" by pointing and clicking with a mouse button on a thunderstorm cell to access a multi-panelled zoomed-in image of the cell. The sub-panels of this image are various radar products that help the forecaster assess the storm cell before preparing a severe weather warning. These sub-images may include CAPPI's at various heights, VIL, EchoTop, radial velocity images, automatic cross-sections and an ensemble depiction of the outputs of the severe weather algorithms. The cells are identified using a reflectivity thresholding technique. The cells are prioritorized using radar feature based rules. Where the same cell is detected in the overlap region between radars, a simple selection rule is used to decide which radar to use to present the information.

To create the maximum flexibility in a wide variety of weather regimes, virtually all aspects of the system are user configurable including the severe weather classification rules. To maintain a watch on upstream and cross-border weather, the system ingests Level 3 data from the NWS WSR88D radars acquired via NOAAPORT. Interaction and display of the radar products is done through a Java based application and is therefore platform and hardware independent providing easy access to the information. In the forecast office, the target display workstation is a dual headed LINUX intel computer.