1. Improved Thunderstorm Detection, Tracking and Assessment Products for Environment Canada Radars
Presented by Pat McCarthy
Prairie and Arctic Storm Prediction Centre
Meteorological Service of Canada (MSC)
David Patrick (Lead Author)
Hydrometeorological and Arctic Lab
MSC

3. THE CHALLENGE FOR FORECASTERS:
Handling a big area, many radars, yet be able
To drill down to the storm scale

4. Canadian Radar and CARDS
31 C-Band Doppler radars nationally
24 conventional data tilt strategy
4 Doppler scans
Many basic conventional and Doppler products (URP)
CAnadian Radar Decision Support (CARDS) system
Similar to WDSS
sophisticated product suite
Primarily designed for severe thunderstorms
Lots of promise but room for improvement
HAL and PASPC exploring ways to enhance CARDS

5. Quick URP/ CARDS overview

6. Multi-radar view

7. Cell-view window

8. Making it better
Radar processing has traditionally been done in isolation from other weather data
But forecasters integrate all datasets when developing a diagnosis
URP was designed to be able to access other data sources such as model data and lightning
It’s time to move to the next level and develop algorithms that take advantage of these multiple data sources …

9. BWER Calculate BWER volume (km^3) as well as BWER height Old BWER
Looked at only 5 directions in upward direction instead of 9
Didn’t require a vertical bound
Didn’t give partial credit for gradients < 8 dBZ/bin
Had a bug that disallowed BWERs north of radar
Ran 10 times slower than new BWER.

11. How do you know if a BWER is real?
Use 3D viewer

12. Zooming out we can see that lots of cells of various intensities are tracked simultaneously
The 2 large boxes represent 2 tornadic supercells

13. New Rank Weight Old Rank Weight (from 2006)
SCIT = Storm Cell Identification Table
New Rank Weight
Old Rank Weight (from 2006)

14. New CELL View Geographic Background (towns & roads)
Observed Storm-relative radial velocities

15. (Velocity Azimuth Display)
Old CARDS VAD
(Velocity Azimuth Display)

16. New VAD

17. Vertical Cross-Section
T -50, -40, -30, -20, -10, 0 C contours plotted
Tw 0, 2, 5 contours plotted

19. Storm-relative Radial Velocity using user-defined storm 257/60 km/h
Storm motion shown here

20. COnstantTemperaturePPI
Access model GRIB data to create any temperature, dewpoint or wetbulb temperature surface
Plot radar echoes on this surface.

21. 50+ dBZ and 20 mm hail over South Winnipeg
Radar echoes at -50C
50+ dBZ and 20 mm hail over South Winnipeg

22. Summary These and many other products are being tested by the PASPC
The more robust products will migrate to operational CARDS nationally
Demonstrates the power of integrating multiple datasets
Many other products being designed

23. Thank you