Quality control of weather radar data using polarimetric variables

Abstract

Because weather radar data are commonly employed in automated weather applications, it is necessary to censor nonmeteorological contaminants, such as bioscatter, instrument artifacts, and ground clutter, from the data.With the operational deployment of a widespread polarimetric S-band radar network in theUnited States, it has become possible to fully utilize polarimetric data in the quality control (QC) process. At each range gate, a pattern vector consisting of the values of the polarimetric andDoppler moments, and local variance of some of these features, as well as 3Dvirtual volume features, is computed. Patterns that cannot be preclassified based on correlation coefficient rHV, differential reflectivity Zdr, and reflectivity are presented to a neural network that was trained on historical data. The neural network and preclassifier produce a pixelwise probability of precipitation at that range gate. The range gates are then clustered into contiguous regions of reflectivity, with bimodal clustering carried out close to the radar and clustering based purely on spatial connectivity farther away from the radar. The pixelwise probabilities are averaged within each cluster, and the cluster is either retained or censored depending on whether this average probability is greater than or less than 0.5. The QC algorithm was evaluated on a set of independent cases and found to perform well, with a Heidke skill score (HSS) of about 0.8.Asimple gate-by-gate classifier, consisting of three simple rules, is also introduced in this paper and can be used if the full QC method is not able to be applied. The simple classifier has an HSS of about 0.6 on the independent dataset. © 2014 American Meteorological Society.