NCDC the "one stop shop" for all WSR-88D level II data services

Abstract

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) currently receives Weather Surveillance Radar - 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) level II (base) data from 120 National Weather Service (NWS), 12 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and 26 Department of Defense (DOD) sites on 8mm tape or online. The NCDC robotic mass storage system warehouses approximately 900 terabytes of Level II data and grows annually at a rate of 60 terabytes a year (120 terabytes with offsite backup). Over the next several years enhanced radar technologies, such as dual polarization, will be implemented and growth of the radar digital archive may increase by a factor of 26. The NCDC is partnering with the Radar Operations Center, the National Severe Storms Lab, the University of Oklahoma and Unidata on the Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test (CRAFT) project. CRAFT started as a grass roots effort to transmit level II data electronically, from 6 WSR-88D sites directly to the NCDC robotic mass storage system. To date, 59 of the 158 WSR-88D sites are transmitting level II data in real time to NCDC. NCDC has truly become a "one stop shop" for WSR-88D radar users. Direct digital access to level II radar inventories, data, and visualization software are available, at no cost to the user, via the NCDC radar resources web page. (http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/radarresources.html) Large data volume (in the past, took weeks to months to disseminate) are accessible in minutes to hours.