Testbeds
National Mosaic and Multi-Sensor QPE (NMQ)
The NMQ system and associated infrastructure was developed at NSSL to serve as a national test bed for QPE and VSTQPF research and development and research-to-operations science infusion. NMQ provides a real-time, around-the-clock, applications development and testing environment that includes automatic algorithm comparison and verification scoring.
The NMQ consists of a prototype real-time computing system that generates three-dimensional mosaics of radar reflectivity and a suite of derived products including multiple rainfall products. The system has also been designed to ingest all relevant grids for rainfall estimation purposes such as multiple radar, rain gauges, satellite imagery, model output, and lightning flashes.
NSSL's National Mosaic and QPE (NMQ) system is being configured to host new science applications as well as components of current methods. The NMQ will be used to address challenges in radar-only QPE, and to facilitate the exploration of strategies and techniques towards improving precipitation estimates for implementation in NEXRAD and AWIPS, as well as precipitation classification (snow, rain, sleet, etc.)
Following the NOAA's Integrated Water Science Plan and the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction System requirements, the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL), the NWS Office of Hydrologic Development's Hydrology Laboratory, and NESDIS have teamed up on the NMQ to build upon current operational tools using state-of-the-art research from a broad community perspective.
3-D Radar Mosaic
As part of NMQ, NSSL has implemented a
system that produces a national (CONUS) 3D radar mosaic grid with a 1-km
horizontal resolution over 21 vertical levels and a 5-minute update cycle.
The mosaic system (termed NM2Q for National Mosaic and Multi-sensor QPE) takes
base level data from all available radars (NEXRAD, Canadian Radar, TDWR, gap
radars) at any given time, performs quality control, and then combines reflectivity
observations from individual radars onto a unified 3D Cartesian frame.
The 3D reflectivity grid can be used for multi-sensor severe storm algorithms,
regional rainfall products generation, aviation weather applications,
and data assimilations for convective scale numerical weather modeling.
The system
can process radar reflectivity into rainrates outside the geographic boundaries
covered by operational WSR-88D precipitation products.
- Reflectivity data are quality controlled using several reflectivity and velocity-based fields in a neural network.
- A technique for correcting rainfall estimates for reflectivity profile effects has been implemented.
- A capability for ingesting data from radar networks other than WSR-88D is under development.
- Lastly, different techniques for adjusting rainfall accumulations using collocated rain gauge reports have been implemented. These products may be viewed at the Q2 web page.
4-D Radar Mosaic
The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) is undertaking a National Radar Mosaic project to seamlessly mosaic all National Weather Service (NWS) and Department of Defense (DOD) WSR-88D radars into a high resolution 4-dimensional mosaic providing the first high resolution depiction of storms in the United States from coast to coast. The advent of internet-2 and effective compression techniques facilitates the transmission of base level radar data from NEXRAD network economically and in real time as demonstrated by the CRAFT (The Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test) project. The result is the ability to integrate the full resolution multiple radar data into a single framework at high-resolution time and space scales. This has been realized in a 3D multiple radar mosaic system that was developed at the NSSL (see above). The system has been generating 3D mosaic of base reflectivity from 32 radars on a grid of 1km resolution (500m in vertical) in real-time for the FAA CIWS (Corridor Integrated Weather System) domain since August of 2002.
NMQ/JADE (Joint Applications Development Environment)
JADE was developed to enable joint development, testing and evaluation of new QPE and short-term QPF science and technology in an open and flexible environment.
NMQ/JADE will:
- Expedite research to operations of new science and technology through the testbed by facilitating testing and evaluation of QPE science for operational implementation in NEXRAD and the Advanced Weather Interactive Processing System (AWIPS)
- Gain understanding necessary to develop radar and multi-sensor QPE methodologies capable of producing high-resolution all-season, all-region, and all-terrain precipitation estimates
- Gain understanding necessary to integrate and assess new data sources from in-situ, radar, and satellite observing systems, and methodologies and techniques to improve QPE in support of hydrology and water resources and severe weather monitoring and prediction at the national scale.
Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT)
The Hydrometeorology Testbed (HMT) is a concept aimed at accelerating the infusion of new technologies, models, and scientific results from the research community into daily forecasting operations of the NWS and its River Forecast Centers. HMT operates as a demonstration with forecasters and researchers joining forces in an operational setting.
The most recent HMT ran from December 1, 2005 through March 1, 2006 and involved the NOAA NWS, NOAA ESRL/PSD, NOAA ESRL/GSD, AND NSSL. NSSL provided on of its SMART-Radars to supplement the coverage of the X-Band polarimetric radar, provided by ESRL/PSD. Their goal was to see how the quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE coverage provided by the National WSR-88D network could improve. Data from both radars will be input into NSSL's national radar mosaic system (NMQ) in order to compute QPE over the basin. Detailed inter-comparison with rain gauges in the basin will provide a metric for evaluating improvements to QPE.
Proof-of-concept results will enhance NOAA's current observing and modeling capabilities and improve predictions of location, timing, and amounts of rainfall.
