Potential Use of the Terminal Doppler Weather Radar Gust Front DetectionAlgorithm on the WSR-88D System Part 1. Impacts of Radar System Differences

摘要

The feasibility of using the gust front detection algorithm (GFDA) developed forthe Terminal Doppler Weather Radar (TDWR) system on a Next Generation Weather Radar WSR-88D (formerly NEXRAD) system is assessed. The data resolution and tilt sequences of the WSR-88D system are different than TDWR, and the WSR-88D is designed to operate at greater ranges. To test the effect of the decreased data resolution of WSR-88D, TDWR-like data were degraded to the resolution of WSR-88D and the GFDA was tested on this degraded dataset. Also, the GFDA was tested on a gust front which occurred outside the normal 60-km range in which data are processed for TDWR. Results show that the degraded velocity precision of WSR-88D has little effect on the performance of the GFDA However, the larger sample volume sizes for the WSR-88D system did degrade the performance of the GFDA. The second lowest tilt angle for the WSR-88D tilt sequences is about 0.5 deg higher than TDWR, and this reduced the maximum range of gust front detectability. These tests show that the GFDA's performance on the WSR-88D system will be acceptable after a few modifications.