Despite the advent of modern radars networks, accurate
monitoring of accumulated precipitation remains a considerable challange.
Efforts are underway at the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) to
improve operational techniques for rainfall estimation from radar and inclusion
of other measurement systems such as satellite. A technique has been developed
which identifies brightbands in the radar data and utilizes cloud top temperature
where radar data is unreliable ( QPE
SUMS ). This technique has been recently implemented at the Salt River
Project in Arizona & will soon be available for use with several radars
in Oklahoma and surrounding areas. Automated schemes for the estimation
of rainfall from geostationary satellite (GOES) have been developed by
NESDIS and are particularly useful for identifying regions of excessive
rainfall & the potential for flash flooding (Experimental
Products for Flash Flood Forecasting) . The NCEP has developed an experimental
estimation of rainfall on the national scale using radar and gauges (National
Stage II Analyses ). The purpose of this Web page is to allow routine
intercomparison of these techniques on a regional basis.
Click here
to compare current hourly precipitation estimates. Currently, the GOES
Autoestimater and Multispectral techniques and the NCEP products are available
for comparison. Results from the NSSL algorithms will be added as soon
as they are implemented. Animations of hourly precipitation over the last
few hours are available for each of the individual techniques:
Java based applications used for interactive animations were developed by Tom Whittaker of the Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The animations can take a while to load, depending on network speed, computer systems, etc. Also, there can be a problem viewing these on certain machines (Macs).