Quality Control and Archiving of Digital Data Gathered by the Bureau of Reclamation's Weather Radar

Abstract

This paid describes the logic and process used to process high volumes of digital radar data recorded on magnetic tape to a compressed quality-checked archival format. The basic Philosophy in the processing is to retain all echo data that exceed the background noise threshold, and to convert fixed-length raw data records to a space-saving variab1e-length format, having about 70 data quality conditions checked and flagged in binary masks. Edit flags provide information to analysts regarding errors or potential errors within the header fields (e.g. azimuth, elevation, date, time, range delay, range interval, and samples per averaged return) and data fields (e.g. suspicious reflectivity gradients, anomalously high reflectivities and reflectivities significantly below the noise threshold).