Abstract

This study explores the scale effects of radar rainfall accumulation fields generated using the new super-resolution level II radar reflectivity data acquired by the Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) network of the Weather Surveillance Radar-1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) weather radars. Eleven months (May 2008-August 2009, exclusive of winter months) of high-density rain gauge network data are used to describe the uncertainty structure of radar rainfall and rain gauge representativeness with respect to five spatial scales (0.5, 1, 2, 4, and 8 km). While both uncertainties of gauge representativeness and radar rainfall show simple scaling behavior, the uncertainty of radar rainfall is characterized by an almost 3 times greater standard error at higher temporal and spatial resolutions (15 min and 0.5 km) than at lower resolutions (1 h and 8 km). These results may have implications for error propagation through distributed hydrologic models that require high-resolution rainfall input. Another interesting result of the study is that uncertainty obtained by averaging rainfall products produced from the super-resolution reflectivity data is slightly lower at smaller scales than the uncertainty of the corresponding resolution products produced using averaged (recombined) reflectivity data. © 2010 American Meteorological Society.

Department(s)

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering

Publication Status

Full Access

Keywords and Phrases

Hydrology; Radar observations; Rainfall; Surface observations

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

1525-755X

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Final Version

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2023 American Meteorological Society, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Oct 2010

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