Using weather radars to estimate precipitation quantity for meteorology and hydrology

Seminar/Forum

Using weather radars to estimate precipitation quantity for meteorology and hydrology

Event space, Ground floor, 333 Exhibition Street, Melbourne
333 Exhibition Street

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More information

wenyan.wu@unimelb.edu.au

This talk is aimed at scientists and engineers who wish to use weather radar data for research purposes, particularly for precipitation estimation, as well as those who have a general interest in modern weather radar observations.

We have used weather radars to estimate precipitation for over 70 years. Until recently the quantitative accuracy of these estimates was rather poor, and required extensive bias correction from other observations, such as rain gauges. This has improved markedly with the advent of modern sophisticated dual-polarization weather radars.

The speaker will introduce the technology of dual polarization weather radar, discuss the advantages and pitfalls of these instruments, and present some of the techniques and algorithms that we have developed for making quantitative estimates of precipitation. The speaker will discuss the availability of public and open research-grade data, such as from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) radars and the US NEXRAD radar network, the latter now being publicly available for free on Amazon Web Services. The speaker will introduce some of the open source software, such as LROSE and PyArt, that is available to researchers who wish to use such data for research purposes. And the speaker will discuss our work to promote common international data exchange formats for atmospheric radars and lidars.

Presenter

  • Dr Mike Dixon
    Dr Mike Dixon, Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

    Dr Mike Dixon

    Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL), National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR)

    Mike Dixon studied Civil Engineering and Hydrology at the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, obtaining B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees. He followed this with an M.S. in Civil Engineering (Hydrology and Hydraulics) at Colorado State University, and a Ph.D in Civil Engineering (Hydrology) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After working in construction and environmental engineering, Mike began working on weather projects, developing algorithms and software for weather radar and other weather observation systems. He has been working at NCAR since 1990, and is now the lead software engineer in the Remote Sensing Group of the Earth Observing Laboratory at NCAR. EOL has a number of radar systems that are deployed around the world for field projects, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Most recently EOL has begun work on the Airborne Phased Array Radar (APAR), and advanced radar for severe weather observations (such as hurricanes) from C130 aircraft. In 2016 Mike obtained NSF funding for the Lidar Radar Open Software Environment (LROSE) project. The goal of LROSE is to make open source radar software available to the research community. Mike has also collaborated with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) for many years. The BOM uses Mike's TITAN software (now part of LROSE) for routine severe weather forecasting and warnings for aviation.

  • Graduate Student Association
  • University of Melbourne Student Union