Weather Surveillance Radar—1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) Open Radar Data Acquisition (ORDA) Enhancements

There have been several tri-agency meetings, with representatives from the Department of Commerce National Weather Service (NWS), the Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the Department of Defense United States Air Force (USAF), from the NEXRAD Operational Support Facility, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Lincoln Laboratories, to determine the future of the Open Radar Data Acquisition (ORDA) component of the WSR-88D.

This paper describes the set of potential requirements from the tri-agency group, and the process for selection into the future ORDA. Among the candidates are improved data quality with finer resolution and new volume coverage patterns, mitigation of range-velocity ambiguities through a combination of phase encoding and multiple PRFs, delivery of up to three sets of base data to users with varying amounts of imposed clutter filtering, complete moment estimation from both surveillance and doppler waveforms, extension of the coverage of complete moment estimation, and eventually range gate spectrum analyses. Dual Polarization will be considered for future enhancements.