A radar signature climatology using WSR-88D Level II data

The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) has completed the processing of all Level II data collected in VCP 11 and 21 during the years 1996 through 1998 from the Pittsburgh, PA WSR-88D. The NSSL enhanced severe weather prediction and detection algorithms were used in the processing of these radar data to identify radar signatures of storms, mesocyclones, tornadic vortex signatures, hail and damaging winds. Given the large volume of data, the algorithms serve as a sufficient tool to identify the radar signatures that otherwise would be exceedingly laborious for the human. This investigation will determine the relative frequency of occurrence in space and time of radar observed phenomena and determine whether particular radar observed phenomena are more prevalent in a given locale. Such an approach will not be free of ambiguity, but given a sufficiently large dataset, it will provide a reliable statistical account of the phenomena that are observed by the WSR-88D. Thus far, NSSL has concentrated on the vortex output from the NSSL Mesocyclone Detection Algorithm and Tornado Detection Algorithm. The results from a much smaller data set were presented during the 19th Severe Local Storms Conference. However, a much larger data set has been processed/analyzed, and the results from the data analysis, including geographical distributions of identified vortices, kernel density distributions of tornadic and non-tornadic vortices, and other statistical analyses of the radar signature data, will be presented. The investigation method, tools, limitations, and future work will also be presented.