NSSL Home > Scientific Publications > Technical Memorandum NSSL-107
The US National Weather Service (NWS) has recently completed the installation of 120 WSR-88D (Weather Surveillance Radar, 1988-Doppler) systems [Crum 93] as part of its $4.5B Modernization and Associated Restructuring Development Plan. Concurrently, there are another 26 Department of Defense and 12 Federal Aviation Administration radars being deployed, for a total of 158 radars of which 141 are in the continental United States.
The WSR-88D radars were originally designed without the archival capability, lacking proper devices for archiving large amount of data. As the scientific research value of the data was recognized, an interim solution was developed to provide the recording and long-term archival of the full-volume, full-precision Level II data (also known as base data). This is done based on 8 mm tape technology, which is extremely human-resource intensive, costly, inefficient, and unreliable. Currently, the archive for the 120 NWS radars is only approximately 65% complete.
In an attempt to begin addressing the long-term needs for WSR-88D base data transmission and archival, the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) at the University of Oklahoma joined forces in 1998 with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, the University of Washington, the National Severe Storms Laboratory, and the WSR-88D Operational Support Facility to establish the Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test (CRAFT). The principal goal of CRAFT is to demonstrate the real time compression and internet-based transmission of WSR-88D base data from multiple radars with a view toward nationwide implementation.
In this report, an overview of the project CRAFT is given. In particular, the purpose of collecting base data and the system configuration used to transmit the data are being discussed. Then, the underlying network structure is examined in order to understand the network properties and constraints. These parameters play an important role in providing the knowledge for further improvements of the network. A simulation using Network Simulator (NS) is done to aid the analysis.