Overview

Winds. A radar wind profiler measures the Doppler shift of electromagnetic energy scattered back from atmospheric turbulence and hydrometeors along 3-5 vertical and off-vertical point beam directions. Back-scattered signal strength and radial-component velocities are remotely sensed along all beam directions and are combined to derive the horizontal wind field over the radar. These data typically are sampled and averaged hourly and usually have 6-m and/or 100-m vertical resolutions up to 4 km for the 915 MHz and 8 km for the 449 MHz systems.

Temperature. To measure atmospheric temperature, a radio acoustic sounding system (RASS) is used in conjunction with the wind profile. These data typically are sampled and averaged for five minutes each hour and have a 60-m vertical resolution up to 1.5 km for the 915 MHz and 60 m up to 3.5 km for the 449 MHz.

Moments and Spectra. The raw spectra and moments data are available for all dwells along each beam and are stored in daily files. For each day, there are files labeled "header" and "data." These files are generated by the radar data acquisition system (LAP-XM) and are encoded in a proprietary binary format. Values of spectral density at each Doppler velocity (FFT point), as well as the radial velocity, signal-to-noise ratio, and spectra width for the selected signal peak are included in these files. Attached zip files, 449mhz-spectra-data-extraction.zip and 449mhz-moment-data-extraction.zip, include executables to unpack the spectra, (GetSpectra32.exe) and moments (GetMomSp32.exe), respectively. Documentation on usage and output file formats also are included in the zip files.

Data Details

Note, the b0 data is identical to 00 data but a netcdf extraction of the b0 data was also created for the duration of the WFIP2 campaign.

Data Quality

Various quality control (QC) algorithms developed over the years process data in real time on the radar software layer. These algorithms, which run in real time, act on time-series, spectra, moment, and consensus data layers that are persisted in different forms.