Hot Items 2004NSSL contributes to successful distribution of high resolution radar data
When NOAA and the National Weather Service made an official announcement they were distributing high-resolution radar data in real-time over the Internet through four top-tier sites, it was the culmination of nearly seven years of work from many people at the National Severe Storms Laboratory, NWS, Unidata, University of Oklahoma and the University of Washington, according to Kevin Kelleher, NSSL Deputy Director and leader of NSSL's efforts on the project.
High-resolution radar data from the national network of Next Generation Radars (NEXRAD), also known as the WSR-88D, is now available in real time to government, university and private sector users. This data represents the highest resolution picture of what the radar system is "seeing" in real time – as the antenna spins. As a result, faster, higher resolution and more detailed weather products will be developed. Researchers have already proven the value of this data in various applications. Now it will be available to everyone.
To make the data available, the National Weather Service expanded on an experiment known as CRAFT, the Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test Project, which was implemented by a coalition of researchers working with NOAA during the past few years. Funding support was received by the NOAA High Performance Computing & Communications and the NOAA Environmental Services Data and Information Management programs.
"The NWS should be commended for taking an innovative CRAFT-like approach in disseminating these data," Kelleher said. "Possibly this same approach could be used by NOAA to disseminate other data sets in the future."
The NWS will distribute the data through three university sites -- Purdue University, University of Oklahoma and The Education and Research Consortium of the Weather Carolinas. In addition, the NWS Telecommunication Operations Center will make data available through a Family of Services approach if there is interest from the commercial community.
The NWS is using the Unidata public domain Local Data Manager technology to collect and redistribute Level II data. The NWS will send copies of the Level II data to the top-tier sites, and Unidata will coordinate the further redistrubtion of data through the university community. The NWS will redistribute Level II data to other federal government users from an NWS server located at the Mid Atlantic Crossroad Gigapop at the University of Maryland.
Some of the people from NSSL and the Cooperative Institute of Mesoscale Meteorological Studies (CIMMS) who should be recognized for their contribution include:
- Doug Rhue (when he was with NSSL) and Mike Jain (project manager) - creation of the RIDDS system to read the data from the wideband 3 port of the 88D
- Mark Benner - installed and supported many versions of this technology over the years
- Karen Cooper - helped support the realtime network and associated hardware
4/14/2004