GIS Hydromet
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. WDT produces a high resolution (1km) radar mosaic that is
updated every 5 minutes using high precision level-II NEXRAD data
from 134 radars across the US.
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.
The below images compare the rainfall output from the National Weather Service and WDT's HydroWatch platform.
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 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.
The below images compare the rainfall output from the National Weather Service and WDT's HydroWatch platform.
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.
