The initial operational concept for the NEXRAD focused on support for the operational forecaster due to concerns about severe weather and hurricanes as well as difficulties in developing reliable fully automated phenomena detection algorithms. By contrast, achieving high integrity in the narrow band products provided by NEXRAD to external users has received much less attention. However, both other government systems [especially the FAA's Integrated Terminal Weather System (ITWS) and the Weather and Radar Processor (WARP)] and, non meteorologist external users of the NEXRAD products through the NEXRAD Information Distribution System (NIDS) need very high integrity NEXRAD products. In the National Weather System context, the direct ingestion of NEXRAD products into mesoscale models will also create much more stringent requirements for integrity of the NEXRAD base data.
Achieving very high integrity through fully automated analysis of only the NEXRAD data is very difficult. We recommend use of a much wider range of contextual information within the NEXRAD to create high integrity external user products. For instance, with the NEXRAD Open RPG and connectivity to AWIPS and ITWS, it will be possible to develop high integrity single NEXRAD product quality control algorithms by the integrated use of information from other sensors.
To illustrate, we will show examples of how data from adjacent NEXRADs can be used to help edit out the anomalous propagation (AP) ground clutter which currently is impacting a number of the NEXRAD reflectivity products. In cases where the NEXRAD is near a major metropolitan area, data from the FAA's TDWR can be used to improve the integrity of the NEXRAD reflectivity products used for hydrology.
Similarly, gridded wind fields estimated from multiple Doppler analyses, aircraft reports, and numerical models can be used to help address difficult challenges in Doppler dealiasing for a single NEXRAD radar.
The paper concludes with suggestions for near term demonstration and evaluation of multisensor approaches to achieving high integrity in the NEXRAD products.
* This work was sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Government.
+ Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations
are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United
States Air Force