Corrections Made in Processing

WISP04, NCAR Marshall Field Site
Feb/Mar/Apr 2004



The following are proposed corrections as of 28-May-04. It is expected that all of these will be implemented, with the date of implementation dependent upon the completion of tasks by the Software Engineers (note that the SEs are over-committed, given upcoming field projectes and other tasks). Text is taken from an e-mail to the system SEs.

  1. Ka and S-Pol beams do not match in azimuth. The direction of mis-match changes with scanning direction. This is likely due to S-band beams being timed at the start of the beam, whereas Ka are timed at the end of a beam. (Note that the discussion on this is ongoing -- Frank Pratte thought the difference was the other way!)

    We need a routine that will time-shift the Ka data by one beam, and match it to the S-band beam.

  2. S-pol gate data do not match Ka gate data. This is obvious from hard target studies. The S-band data needs to be moved outward by one (integer) gate. This includes a lot of parameters!

  3. The Ka band HH noise power is in error in the Ka housekeeping, and has an impact on calculated values of Ka power (P_HH_K), which goes into Ka reflectivity (Z_HH_K). Housekeeping shows noise power of -110.0 and -110.5. Frank P's best guess value is -112.1. This makes a real difference at low rec'd power, and should be fixed.

    After consulting with Frank, we may also want the option of putting in an artifically *low* value of noise power. Something selectable like -200 dBm might be nice. This will effectively nulify the noise correction to the power measurement (or maybe we could just turn off the noise correction).

    Note that the cross-polar Ka noise power is also in error.

  4. We need to adjust for a bias in S-band Zdr. Analysis indicates that we have to add .08 dB to all Zdr values.

  5. We need to correct the Ka copolar radar constant for the first portion of the experiment. The correction can be applied to Z_HH_K (similar to the Zdr correction at S-band), or we could attack things up front by changing the radar constant and using the new value to re-calculate Z_HH_K fgrep P_HH_K and range.

  6. The hardest job is an adjustment of Z_HH_K based upon an expected P_HH_K test pulse power, combined with an automatic analysis of a sweep-by-sweep variation from that nominal value.

    For this, you need to have a declared nominal TP power value, compute the average TP power for a sweep (being sure to filter out any meteorological echoes!!!), then adjust all the echo powers by the amount of the difference, do the noise correction, and compute the reflectivity.


--- Bob Rilling --- / NCAR Atmospheric Technology Division
Created: Tue Jun 15 09:47:02 MDT 2004
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