| Abstrakt: |
Since the advent of dual-polarized technology, many studies have been conducted to determine the extent to which the differential reflectivity (ZDR) and specific differential phase shift (KDP) add benefits to estimating rain rates (R) to reflectivity (Z). It has been previously noted that this new technology provides significant improvement to rain rate estimation, but only for ranges within 125 km from the radar. Beyond this range, it is nebulous as to whether the National Weather Service conventional R(Z)-Convective algorithm is superior, as little research has investigated radar precipitation estimate performance at large ranges. The current study investigates the performance of three radars, St. Louis (KLSX), Kansas City (KEAX), and Springfield (KSGF), MO, with respect to range, with 15 terrestrial based tipping buckets served as ground-truth to the radars. Over 1100 hours of precipitation data was analyzed for the current study. It was found that, in general, performance degraded with range beyond, approximately, 150 km from the radar. Probability of detection in addition to bias values decreased, while the false alarm ratios increased as range increased. Bright-band contamination was observed to play a potential role as large increases in the absolute bias and overall error values near 120 km for the cool season, and 150 km in the warm season. The analyses found furthers our understanding in the strengths and limitations of the Next Generation Radar system overall, and from a seasonal perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
