Progress in the Use of Weather Data from Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Radars in Combination With the WSR-88D

The FAA presently operates several types of air traffic control (ATC) radars with associated weather data processing. These data, combined with the WSR-88D data, could be beneficial in many ways for the NWS, DOD, and FAA operations. The applicable FAA radars are the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR), the Airport Surveillance Radars (ASR-9 and 11), and the Air Route Surveillance Radar (ARSR-4).

The proposed approach for multi-agency use of the FAA weather radar data takes advantage of the flexibility and capacity of the Open Systems Radar Product Generator (ORPG) scheduled to replace the current RPG beginning in late 2000. The ORPG would ingest the FAA data, perform pre-processing to convert the data from the different radars to a common format, and generate both stand-alone products and products combining the FAA data with WSR-88D data. All products would be made available to WSR-88D users through the existing ORPG communication interfaces.

Benefits to the Nation in the use of FAA weather radar data to complement the WSR-88D include: (1) mitigation of the WSR-88D "cone of silence", (2) long range, low-level phenomena, (3) different viewing perspectives for a given storm, (4) potential mitigation of range folding obscuration, (5) backup during outages, (6) data in areas of incomplete coverage, (7) multiple Doppler analyses, (8) improved "best info" mosaics, (9) improved quality control of WSR-88D weather radar data, and (10) improved precipitation estimates.

Activities are currently underway to: (1) integrate planning and management activities into the NEXRAD Product Improvement (NPI) project, and (2) develop and demonstate TDWR and ARSR-4 data.