SHAVE Facilities

SHAVE is conducted in the NSSL/SWAT developmental lab (photo) at the National Weather Center building on the campus of the University of Oklahoma. The room features 4-50" plasma monitors for situation awareness and collaboration, several IP phone lines with headsets and enough room for 10 workers.

The laboratory contains several workstations with adequate display, processing, and memory capabilities to run the WDSSII display (wg), Google Earth, and Mozilla Firefox. In addition 2 Windows-based computers to also facilitate Delorme Street Atlas software and streaming audio and video from the internet.

SHAVE uses data from the NSSL/SPC CONUS WDSSII system, which ingests data from most WSR-88D radars in the United States and builds a three-dimensional shapshot of the radar reflectivity over the CONtinental US. The data update once every five minutes with a grid resolution of 1 km by 1km (horizonal) by 1 km (vertical). Several products, such as Maximum Expected Size of Hail (MESH) may be derived from the 3D reflectivity and other data fields. Additional details of the CONUS WDSSII system may be found in Lakshmanan et al 2006.