World Meteorological Organization

Vol I -  Weather Radar Network Design

Target audience: Upper management, decision makers, funding agencies

Weather radars are arguably the most expensive and most complex instruments within operational National Meteorological and Hydrological Services. They strengthen, enable, and indeed can revolutionize the services provided by NMHSs to economically and socially benefit society. Part A provides a guide to the development of an end-to-end radar program.

Required competencies include: Project leadership and management, meteorological, engineering, support and maintenance, R&D.

Costing: estimates are needed for the complete life cycle, which can be 15-40 years, divided into program phases. Annual estimates also needed.

Radar project is also distinguished from the program as a limited time endeavour with well-defined scope and resources, e.g. an upgrade.

Network design includes choice of technology, deciding how many and where to install radars, all in relation to user requirements, potential advantages from collaborative networking domestically and internationally, and contributing towards integrated observing systems and networks.

Vol II -  Weather Radar Technology

Target audience: Decision makers, managers, engineering and technical practitioners, scientists

A complete weather radar system consists of combined technological solutions that provide information supporting well-defined user requirements.

As such, the system comprises: the radar instrument, radome, tower, personnel and equipment shelter(s), power, reserve power, ancillary systems (e.g. climate control, lightning protection, security), communications, control and data processing software, computational resources, data storage/archive.

Strategic decisions on weather radar technology need to be made on: wavelength (for operational systems commonly X, C, or S bands), transmitter type (magnetron, klystron, solid state), beam width, sensitivity, “type”. Today, polarimetric (or dual-polarization) technology is established as the mainstream weather radar type. It is difficult to buy a weather radar that does not have polarimetric and Doppler capabilities.

Examples of emerging weather radar technologies are pulse-compression techniques (already common in places) and phased array antennas.

Vol III - Weather Radar Procurement

Target audience: Decision makers, managers, procurement specialists, engineering, technical, and scientific support to the procurement process

When you go shopping for a weather radar, how can you be sure you will really get a weather radar and not something else? Can you be assured that your new radar will have relevant, contemporary, and up-to-date features? The objective of Part C is to describe and provide examples of different approaches to weather radar procurement.

The greatest challenge when implementing weather radars will be that of human resources (availability of highly qualified people) and intellectual capacity (technical and meteorological). Training and other capacity building activities need to be part of strategic planning on a 5+ year time scale and be included in the radar procurement or project.

Included in weather radar procurement (other than radar instrument): infrastructure and civil works, project management, warranty period, support and maintenance, different levels of training, responsibility for configuration/data quality, acceptance testing, spares, life-cycle management, upgrade plan, integration with NMHS infrastructure, software/application development, auxiliary meteorological sensors (on/off site).

Vol IV - Weather Radar Siting, Configuration and Scan Strategies

Target audience: People who are in the process of getting their first weather radar.

Congratulations! You have money to buy a radar, and you know roughly where the radar should be. This Volume of the BPG walks you through how you know you have the right hill (site and access road), how you make sure your radar can measure when it is up and running (horizon and permissions), how to get the radar data to its users (telecommunications) and how to keep it running even when thunderstorms cut off your normal power supply. And it gives you suggestions for how to measure: scan strategy is always a compromise.

Some estimated numbers, underlining the importance of this part: cost of the tower and other site infrastructure constitutes a significant proportion of the radar purchase cost. Cost of keeping the radar running is annually 5-10% of the purchase cost.

Vol V - Weather Radar Calibration, Monitoring and Maintenance

Target audience: Operations, monitoring and maintenance practitioners and planners

Weather radars are observation equipment designed to deliver quantitative data about hydrometeors in the atmosphere, including their location in 3-D space. Calibration is required to interpret the returned pulse (power, phase) and ensure that antenna pointing accuracy is within specified limits. Phase and power calibration require measurement of losses and phase shifts  through components within the transmit and receive paths. In addition to this legacy calibration, for dual-polarization radars extra calibration and monitoring should be performed using external sources, for example, solar radiation (receiver and pointing), ground-based disdrometers,  ground clutter and/or space-based radar. Continuous monitoring of radar system performance may be useful for scheduling additional preventative maintenance, prolonging the life of components. (Preventive) maintenance is the basis for high availability and covers not only electrical and mechanical, but also analog components as well as IT.
 

Vol VI - Weather Radar Data Processing

Target audience: radar operators, radar engineers, radar application developers, radar data product users

This Volume provides processing methods to make radar product from raw moment data observed by weather radars. At first, noise and spurious echoes should be removed from raw moment data by quality control processing. Then radar data products such as distributions of rain rate and hydrometer class are derived from quality controlled (QC) moment data. Compositing processes are used for making wide-coverage products. The characteristics and limitations of each processing are also described. In an end-to-end perspective, our ends are defined as basic QC of moment data to quantitative precipitation estimation (QPE), together with identifying suitable data quality assessment metrics for each method. Data quality metrics are systematically addressed, mostly for reflectivity-based processing, in an annex.

Vol VII - Weather Radar Data Representation and International Exchange

Target audience: Decision makers, IT experts, radar application developers, radar data users

 This Volume provides guidance on the representation of weather radar polar sweep and volume data in the standardized FM301-CfRadial2 format, including identification of the data types and associated metadata which are required to support a broad range of operational and scientific applications. FM301 was published in the WMO Manual on Codes (No. 306) in 2023.
Methods and technologies which may be used to implement international weather radar data exchanges are identified, and other relevant issues such as data licensing and the management of site metadata (through the WMO Radar Database) are discussed. The emerging standard for international data exchange, the WMO Information System v2 (WIS2) is recognized as an appropriate means of real-time exchange of weather radar data among WMO members.
 

Vol VIII - Operational Weather Radar Glossary of Terminology

This Volume may complement existing resources like the AMS Glossary and potentially a new WMO Standard Vocabulary, to help with experience sharing and technological transfer.