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UNIVERSITY OF BUCHAREST
FACULTY OF PHYSICS Guest
2024-11-23 17:39 |
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Conference: Bucharest University Faculty of Physics 2009 Meeting
Section: Atmosphere and Earth Science; Environment Protection
Title:
Assessment of weather radar beam blockage over the Romanian
territory - a GIS-based methodology
Authors:
Sorin Burcea
Bogdan Antonescu
Affiliation:
National Meteorological Administration
sos.Bucuresti-Ploiesti 97
Bucharest, Romania
E-mail
sorin.burcea@meteoromania.ro
Keywords:
radar, beam blockage, Doppler, network, GIS
Abstract:
The Romanian National Meteorological Administration (NMA) has upgraded the national meteorological infrastructure with the state of the art equipments for forecasting and monitoring the weather over the national territory in order to provide more accurate forecasts and warnings when severe weather occurs. The major change in the system architecture was the replacement and modernization of the national weather radar network. NMA has installed new Doppler weather surveillance radars (WSR-98D) and integrated them in the network along with the other types of radar equipments that provide precipitation maps for the Romania. Some of these radars operate in mountainous regions and consequently suffer from beam blockage caused by terrain obstacles. A methodology for assessing the severity of the beam blockage and outline its implications for radar-derived precipitation estimates is presented. The methodology is based on calculation of two-dimensional maps of power loss using a digital elevation model (DEM) of beam propagation for different radar antenna elevation angles. For visualization, ArcGIS software is used to illustrate the results and offer a physical interpretation of the analyzes. The study involves five NEXRAD sites: Medgidia, Barnova, Bobohalma, Oradea and Timisoara. By analyzing the maps, one can observe that some sites not suffer for significant blockage except narrow sectors while the others contains several areas of blockage. We conclude that DEM-based prediction of radar beam occultation represents a viable tool for calculating power loss for the assessment of weather radar beam blockage in various terrain regions.
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