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Tuesday, September 07, 2010

Today's Weather

General Weather: Normal summer weather , but dust haze at first.

Wind: Mainly n'ly 05 to 10kt reaching 10 to 15kt at times.

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Radar


	Education Centre

General Meteorology :	Air Masses - Cold Front - Fog - High Pressure - Humidity - Introduction to Weather - Large Thunderstorms - lightning - Low-Pressure - Meteorology - Occlusion Fronts - Rain - Sea Breaze & Land Breaze - Temperature - The Water Cycle - Tornadoes - Warm Front - Wind

Clouds :	Cirrus - Clouds - Cumulus - Cumulonimbus -

Radar :	General - Radar Technology - Attenuation in the atmosphere - Velocity measurements - Sources of error - Optimizing radar characteristics - Radar installation - Precipitation measurements

Precipitation measurements

Measurement of precipitation by radars has been a subject of interest since the early days of radar meteorology. The most important advantage of using radars for precipitation measurements is the coverage of a large area with high spatial and temporal resolution from a single observing point and in real time. Furthermore, the two-dimensional picture of the weather situation can be extended over a very large area by compositing data from several radars. However, we have only recently achieved the ability to make measurements over a large area with an accuracy that is acceptable for hydrological applications.

Unfortunately, precise assessment of this accuracy is not possible - partly because no satisfactory basis of comparison is available. A common approach is to use some network of gauges as a reference against which to compare the radar estimates. This approach has an intuitive appeal, but suffers from a fundamental limitation: there is no reference standard against which to establish the accuracy of areal rainfall measured by the gauge network on the scale of the radar beam. Nature does not provide homogeneous, standard rainfall events for testing the network and there is no higher standard against which to compare the network data. Therefore, one does not know the true rainfall for the area or the accuracy of the gauge network. Indeed there are hints that the gauge accuracy may, for some purposes, be far inferior to what is commonly assumed, especially if the estimates come from a relatively small number of raingauges (Neff, 1977).

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