1. The Swedish Weather Radar Production Chain
Daniel Michelson
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute
Focus on:
Higher-order products
Quality improvements
Quality characterization

2. SWERAD Operated jointly between SMHI and Swedish Armed Forces
12 Ericsson C-band Doppler radars
Almost complete national coverage
Vilebo, formerly Norrköping

3. NORDRAD Finland, Sweden, Norway Estonia associate member
Special arrangement with Denmark
Established in late 1980's
Organized as an operational NORDMET activity
R&D internationally organized as NORDMET Radar Applications (NORA) activity
Constitutes the backbone of Swedish production

4. BALTRAD NORDRAD+ All of POLRAD Peripheral German radars
Netherlands (wind profiles)
Baltic Sea Experiment
BALTEX Radar Data Centre at SMHI
R&D only
Test environment for operational implementations

5. QC using operational satellite products* Meteosat 8 (MSG)
Cloud type product from NWC SAF: 4 km, 15 min
4 cloud-free classes
No surrogate for good Doppler, but better than nothing
Operational since March 1
Improvements possible using quality flags in satellite product?
*Spin-off from: Michelson D.B. and Sunhede D., 2004: Spurious weather radar echo identification and removal using multisource temperature information. Meteorol. Appl. 11, 1-14
last Tuesday, 18 UTC

6. QC using operational satellite products* Meteosat 8 (MSG)
Cloud type product from NWC SAF: 4 km, 15 min
4 cloud-free classes
No surrogate for good Doppler, but better than nothing
Operational since March 1
Improvements possible using quality flags in satellite product?
*Spin-off from: Michelson D.B. and Sunhede D., 2004: Spurious weather radar echo identification and removal using multisource temperature information. Meteorol. Appl. 11, 1-14

7. Accumulated precipitation
Generated using filtered composites
Simplified version of the BALTRAD gauge- adjustment technique*
1 hour, 2 km, 32 bits
Uses 12-hour SYNOP gauge accumulations at 6 and 18 UTC
thesholded at 0.1 mm
*Koistinen J. and Michelson D.B., 2002: BALTEX weather radar-based precipitation products and their
accuracies. Boreal Env. Res. 7(3),

8. Operational gauge- radar relations
Derived every 12 hours, using systematically corrected SYNOP gauge observations*
F = 10 x log(G/R)
2nd-order polynomial fit against surface distance, with some QC
Coefficients are archived and can be used with reflectivities, rainrates, and accumulations
*Michelson D.B., 2004: Systematic correction of precipitation gauge observations using
analyzed meteorological variables. J. Hydrol. 290,
The arrival of spring!

9. Swedish-Norwegian mountains 30 July 2006
Östersund
Trondheim
Photo: Banverket
1-hr accumulation ending 15:00 UTC

10. OPERA Quality Framework
Quality indicator image stored in HDF5 product file along with coefficients, allows fully reversible adjustment procedure for quality characterization.