Quality Control and Verification of Weather Radar Wind Profiles

Abstract

Weather radar wind profiles (WRWPs) have been retrieved from Doppler volume scans using different implementations of the velocity?azimuth display (VAD) and volume velocity processing (VVP) methods. An extensive quality control of the radial velocity data and the retrieved wind vectors has been applied. The quality and availability of the obtained wind profiles have been assessed by comparisons with collocated radiosonde observations and numerical weather prediction (NWP) data over a 9-month period. The comparisons reveal that the VVP methods perform better than the VAD methods, and that the simplest implementation of the VVP (VVP1) method performs the best of all. The availability fraction of VVP1 wind vectors is about 0.39 at ground level and drops below 0.16 at a 6-km altitude. The observation minus background statistics of the VVP1 wind profiles against the High Resolution Limited Area Model (HIRLAM) NWP model are at least as good as those of the radiosonde profiles. This result clearly demonstrates the high quality of (quality controlled) weather radar wind profiles.