A Program for the Assembly and Display of Radar-Echo Distributions

Abstract

The great information-processing capacity of modern digital computers is used to assemble radar data in a form suitable for its application to weather analysis and forecasting studies and for investigation of the data's physical and statistical properties. Data are collected by PPI photography at steps of the antenna-elevation angle and radar-system sensitivity and aye reduced manually to digital form. The data are registered on magnetic tape for entry to the digital computer, wherein they are edited, range-normalized, reassembled to produce plan distributions that refer to a constant altitude above the earth, and processed for the distributions of the heights of echo bases and tops. Any of a practically limitless number of processing combinations can be selected to portray the intensity, male, and vertical development characteristic of the echoes for a particular period and location. The outputs of the computer program are printed distributions, for visual inspection and manual processing, and magnetic tapes containing the data in a form suitable for analysis by other computer routines. This program provides practical means for developing knowledge of radar data; realization of the full benefits of radar under operational conditions will require instruments which quantize the data rapidly.