Ground-Based Weather Radar to Investigate Thunderstorms

Abstract

Weather radars are considered an essential tool to identify and analyze rapidly evolving phenomenon like thunderstorms that are related to threats like high precipitation rates or wind speeds. Depending on the characteristics of radar, different features of a thunderstorm can be detected to highlight important characteristics such its severity, trajectory evolution and particle type distribution within the storm cloud. This chapter describes how different radar measurements (reflectivity, Doppler measurements, and dual-polarization measurements) are usually exploited by radar experts to identify important characteristics of such phenomena. In particular, dual-polarization weather radar allows to identify and quantify the presence of graupel particles that can be present within a cumulonimbus and can be associated with electrical activity, which is the unique characteristic of a thunderstorm.