The use of digital weather radar records for short-term precipitation forecasting

✍ Scribed by G. L. Austin; A. Bellon

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1974
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 433 KB
• Volume: 100
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0035-9009
• DOI: 10.1002/qj.49710042612

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

Weather radar may be used for forecasting the motion and development of precipitation patterns. A technique is described here which uses digital data sets and a computer pattern‐matching programme to forecast storm motion for periods between one‐half and 2 or 3 hours. The technique is able to track systems as they appear over the edge of the display by locking on to the leading edge features. Considerable attention has been given to evaluation techniques and more than 30 experiments involving seven different days of data from radars in Toronto and Montreal have been performed. It was found that although different classes of events had different forecastabilities, it was possible to obtain useful results for one hour forecasts on all the events studied.