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receives funding to develop a national prototype |
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The 120 Doppler weather radars recently installed by the NWS were originally viewed as real-time surveillance systems. However, archived and real-time WSR-88D Level II (base) data have been found to be valuable in both numerical prediction and radar based decision support systems. As a result, all radars were retrofitted with an 8mm robotic tape cartridge recording system; technology that is costly, inefficient, and unreliable. The NOAA ESDIM program has recently funded a three-year project led by NSSL to address the compelling need for real-time and archive WSR-88D base data. NSSL, working with OU's CAPS and School of Computer Science, the NWS Radar Operations Center, and National Center for Data Control (NCDC), will leverage an existing base data ingest project (CRAFT). The goal is to design a prototype system for a nationwide direct digital ingest and archival of base data at the NCDC via existing network infrastructures (Abilene, NGI, Internet2) in a manner consistent with the NOAA Networking Architecture. The project involves the investigation of radar data compression algorithms,
transmission of the WSR-88D data to NCDC in real-time for direct archival,
and support of UCAR's Unidata Local Data Manager features to make these
data available in real-time to universities and government researchers,
creation of web-based browsing and data mining capabilities to examine
and extract data, and demonstrations of the usefulness of real-time
base data in numerical forecast models and decision-support systems. For more information contact Kevin Kelleher at Kevin.Kelleher@nssl.noaa.gov
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