Radar data quality control procedures in the VOLTAIRE project applied to data from Switzerland, Cyprus and Spain
Thomas EINFALT
einfalt&hydrotec GbR, Lübeck, Germany
Abstract
One of the objectives of the VOLTAIRE project was the analysis of recent radar data quality control procedures and their implementation in a software library. This library has now been completed and is available since end of April 2006.
The creation of the library started with a thorough literature check producing a literature pool in a data base. After the evaluation of the literature, a list of frequent radar data quality problems has been compiled. The most promising of the algorithms have been selected for further analysis on data from Cyprus, Switzerland and Spain. For some problems where no algorithms were available so far, suitable data check and correction procedures have been designed and implemented, e.g. for bright band detection on PPI data, or for negative speckle (i.e. pixels deleted by a clutter elimination procedure situated in a rain field).
All in all, 17 versions of control algorithms have been implemented, applicable to cartesian PPI data, polar PPI data and polar volume data.
Operational results from the application of elements from the library to radar data in Germany and Thailand have already been published.
The algorithms have been produced as a C++-library, being available for Windows based systems, have been included in "QCTool", a free demonstration tool, included in "QCTool professional" for mass data correction, and have been included in the SCOUT radar data processing tool. Both versions of QCTool are based on the HDF5 format developed in VOLTAIRE (Golz et al., 2006).
References
Golz, C., Einfalt, T., Galli, G. (2006). An operational generalised metadata concept for radar data. Submitted for publication, Meteorologische Zeitschrift.