1 P 4 . 4 Three-Dimensional Radar Mosaic Integrating WSR-88 Ds and Canadian Radar Network

Through the funding of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Aviation Weather Research Program, a system for the creation of high-resolution national 3D radar mosaic has been developed and is running in real-time at the National Severe Storms Lab (NSSL) since June 2004 (Zhang et al. 2004). The system ingests and quality controls base level reflectivity data from over 140 WSR-88D radars in the conterminous United States (CONUS) domain, and then objectively analyzes the data onto a seamless 3-D Cartesian grid. The 3-D reflectivity mosaic grid has a horizontal resolution of ~1 km x 1 km and 31 vertical levels ranging from 500 m to 18 km above mean sea level (NSL). The mosaic is updated every 5 minutes.