Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
this increases the error of the Doppler velocity estimates by the square root of two, the
improved angular resolution can increase the range, by about 50% (Brown et al., 2002 and
2005), to which mesocyclones and violent tornadoes can be detected. Therefore in the
recently introduced scanning patterns, the data (i.e., spectral moments) are provided at 0.5
o
increments in azimuth (Section 3.5).
2.2 Radar operation
The essence of the hardware (Fig. 1) is what radar operators see on the console. To the left of
the data link (R,V,W,D) is the radar data acquisition (RDA) part consisting of the
transmitter, antenna, microwave circuits, receiver, and signal processor. These components
are located at radar site and data is transmitted to the local forecast office (LFO) where
Radar Product Generation (RPG, Fig. 1) takes place. Operators at the LFO control (the block
Control in Fig. 1) the radar and observe/analyze displays of data fields. At a glance of a
console they can see the operating status of the radar and data flow. In the RPG the data is
transformed into meteorologically meaningful information (Products in Fig. 1) by
algorithms executed on Ethernet cluster of workstation.
Fig. 1. Block diagram of the WSR-88D seen on the console of operators.
