GIS Hydrologic Modeling
WDT's mosaics and other services are borne out of leading meteorological research organizations like the National Severe Storms Laboratory, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, MIT/Lincoln Laboratories, and McGill University. WDT has licensed these technologies to form our "HydroWatch" Decision Support System.
The radar data undergo a fully automated Quality Control (QC) procedure using a combination of expert system, neural network techniques and surface weather observations. This ensures that the radar mosaic is void of clutter and leads to more accurate rainfall estimation. Using 30m terrain information, the radar data are mosaicked by selecting the lowest radar beam from the volume at each grid cell that is unblocked by terrain.
The mosaic uses multiple radars for gap-filling where other radars are blocked and for automatic redundancy should the nearest radar fail to operate. Finally, a precip/no-precip mask is applied to the radar mosaic using GOES satellite cloud top temperature and surface temperature data to eliminate any remaining non-precipitation echo.
WDT provides its "HydroWatch" display for the viewing of all rainfall products, radar data, and weather information, that is fully customizable for each user and also provide its rainfall and future rainfall products on a 1km grid in any data format required such as netCDF, ESRI GIS Shapefile, png, GIF and can be easily used as input for hydrologic modeling.
The images above compare the rainfall output from the National Weather Service and WDT's Hydromet platform.
For more information, contact:
DeWayne Mitchell (405) 579.7675 x227
