American Meteorological Society
Radar Calibration and
Validation Specialty Meeting
Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A.
13-14 January 2001
| Meeting Program Committee |
AMS Radar Committee on
Meteorology |
Paul Joe (Chair),
Tim Crum, Jerry Crescenti, Dick Doviak, Juerg Joss, Jeff Keeler, Ron
Rinehart, Paul Smith, Jr., Jothiram Vivekanandan, Allen White, Isztar Zawadzki |
Paul Joe (Chair)
Don Burgess, Tim Crum, Juerg Joss, Cindy Mueller, Ron Rinehart, Matthias
Steiner, Roger Wakimoto, Josh Wurman |
The Presentations
Introduction
The purpose of the workshop was to gather together radar experts to review
the state of knowledge about calibrating radars. Calibration is defined
as the measurement of system characteristics which enter into the determination
of observed quantities. Calibration traditionally focusses on the
hardware and looked at the transmitter, antenna and receiver. In
the interpretation of the observed quantities, the performance of the hardware
which involves looking at pulse shapes, beam patterns, antenna sidelobe
performance, noise, etc. is also important.
From an user perspective, the bottom line is often a comparison made
with raingauge measurements. Often, the user will attribute
poor or disparate comparisons to the "calibration" of the radar.
However, the comparison involves the physics of precipitation, rainfall
measurement and statistics and not only on the radar hardware.
We briefly touch on this topic in this workshop to emphasize that
these comparisons do not validate the calibration of the radar but is a
different but related part of radar meteorology. It deserves a separate
and more extensive workshop on its own..
The last calibration workshop was done in the mid-seventies. It
involved a small number of people and included a hands-on demonstration.
Since then, progress has been made in many areas. New radar technologies
have flourished such as Doppler and polarization. Wind profilers
and satellite borne systems are now available. Digital technology
has made a big impact on data acquisition and signal processing.
In addition, the use of weather radar for quanititative precipitation estimation
is also flourishing. With these diverse systems and more groups working
with the applications of weather radar, it was time to review what we know
about radar calibration and validation. .
With the diversity in systems and in interests, it was not possible
to conduct a hands-on type of workshop. A meeting format was chosen
with invited speakers to lead and provoke the discussion.
The material presented at the workshop was collated into this CD and represents
a lot of hard work over the years not only by the presenting authors but
by those that preceded them as well.
The Sessions
-
Introduction
-
System
Overviews
-
Radar
Components
-
External
Calibration
-
Advanced
Topics
-
Validation
Issues
The Attendees
Email Addresses
Technical Notes on CD Material
-
PDF was chosen as the format for the material on the CD. You need
Adobe's Acrobat Reader (available free at http://www.adobe.com)
to view the presentations.
-
Chris Clarke provided some web pages as well as a text document..
-
I have included Ron Rinehart's presentation as a Microsoft Power Point
Show file (the pps file) in order to capture the humour and
flavour of the animations. You will need to copy it to your disk
and have a compatible version of the software to view it.
-
The quality of the PDF files are generally very high but there are a few
discrepencies. In most cases, the original presentation material
was received as softcopy and converted to Adobe's PDF format from the various
file formats. However, in a few cases, the original papers or transparencies
were scanned, a Microsoft Power Point presentation was created
and then finally converted to PDF format. The limiting factor was
the scanning and these presentations are of slightly lower quality.
-
Adobe Acrobat does not convert the WPMathA font, found in equations, due
to licensing restrictions nor does not convert postscript figures embedded
in Word or Wordperfect documents. So those documents were first converted
to postscript format first and then converted PDF. The resulting
PDF file contains extraneous lines but is legible. I have included the
postscript file that does not contain these extraneous lines. You
need to download the postscript file and then use a postscript viewer such
as Ghostview to ead the postscript files (Ghostview is available at http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/).
-
Ken Tapping's paper in PDF format viewed well but did not print well for
me, so I include a postscript version of his paper for printing purposes.
Acknowledgements
-
Thank you to the Program Committee who was instrumental in shaping the
program.
-
Thank you to Merlyn Persaud of the Meteorological Service of Canada who
provided logistics support during the workshop
-
Thank you to Steve Lapczak of the National Radar Project of Canada who
provided funding to cover incidental costs.
-
Finally, thank you to all the presenters who took the time and effort to
prepare their presentations and share their knowledge.
CD Version
-
1.0 is the initial version sent to participants and speakers, March 2001
-
2.0 is the version on the AMS web site with an updated paper by David Atlas,
April 2001
Paul Joe, Workshop Chair
Meteorological Service of Canada
Jan 2001