A Mobile, Phased-Array Doppler Radar for the Study of Severe Convective Storms

Abstract

A mobile X-band, phased-array Doppler radar was acquired from the U.S. Army by the Center for Interdisciplinary Remotely Piloted Aircraft Studies (CIRPAS) at the Naval Postgraduate School and adapted for meteorological use by ProSensing, Inc. The radar was used during field experiments conducted in the Southern Plains by faculty and students from the School of Meteorology at the University of Oklahoma during the spring storm seasons of 2007 and 2008. During these field experiments, storm-scale, rapid-scan, volumetric, Doppler-radar observations were obtained in tornadic and nontornadic supercells, quasilinear mesoscale convective systems, and in both boundary layer?based and elevated ordinary convective cells. A case is made for the use of the radar for studies of convective weather systems and other weather phenomena that evolve on time scales as short as tens of seconds.