Study on reflectivity data interpolation and mosaics for multiple Doppler weather radars

Abstract

Multiple weather radars’ joint detection can enlarge the radar detection range and can improve the detection accuracy, which has become an important method to monitor large-scale weather effectively. In this paper, the methods of interpolating reflectivity volume scan data onto the grids in the Cartesian coordinate system and three-dimensional mosaic for gridded reflectivity data of several radars are studied. In order to retain the physical characteristics of the raw data, the smoothing parameters of adaptive Barnes interpolation are improved which based on the space structure of the raw reflectivity data. Through comparison of constant altitude plan position indication (CAPPI) images obtained by the commonly used interpolation schemes and the improved Adaptive Barnes interpolation, it was found that the latter can provide consecutive reflectivity fields and retain high-resolution structure comparable to the raw data. The mean deviation filter filtering erroneous grid data and the data are fused by various fusion methods. Result shows that Exponential Weighting is an excellent method which can provide continuous three-dimensional reflectivity mosaic data.