High-resolution precipitation estimates for hydrological uses

Abstract

The use of precipitation estimates from weather radar for hydrological applications has been limited by the quantitative accuracy, reliability and resolution. The adoption of a more centralised approach to radar data processing, upgrades to telecommunications links and the installation of additional radars in the UK weather radar network have enabled some of these limitations to be addressed. The development of more flexible product generation software, which more fully exploits the resolution of the radar measured reflectivity, now provides for the mapping of precipitation on scales of 1 km and even below, thus approaching the resolution requirements for applications in urban hydrology. This paper describes the methods by which these high-resolution precipitation products are now generated. Illustrations of the products are given and their use in predicting flow using an urban drainage model is demonstrated. Issues affecting data quality, and the advantages and disadvantages of using radar products at high resolution are discussed.

Extreme Wave Analysis by Integrating Model and Wave Buoy Data

“…In hydrology, for example, regional models for hydro-meteorological variables, such as extreme or annual rainfall, are often obtained by coupling a deterministic indicator, based on models, with a spatial model of the residuals measured at gauged sites [19][20][21][22]. A similar approach is also used for extracting the estimated rainfall rate at ground through meteorological radars and rain gauge measurements [23,24]. Several methods have been introduced to this purpose [23][24][25][26][27].…”

A radar‐based rainfall climatology of Great Britain and Ireland

“…This product is derived from the Great Britain and Ireland radar network (Figure 1; Kitchen and Illingworth, 2011) and since mid-2005 has been operating under the data processing chain described by Harrison et al (2009). There have been some changes to the network over 2006-2013 that may affect our climatology.…”

“…The retrieved precipitation rate is then corrected for orographic enhancement (Georgiou et al, 2011) and adjusted to match local gauge observations on a radar-by-radar basis (Kitchen et al, 1994;Lewis and Harrison, 2007;Harrison et al, 2012). These single-radar rain-rate retrievals are then composited to a uniform grid, weighting by both distance to the radar and pixel quality (Harrison et al, 2009;. An overview of the process of precipitation retrieval from radar reflectivities over Great is known about how the radar precipitation composite performs over multi-annual scales.…”

Snowbands over the English Channel and Irish Sea during cold‐air outbreaks

“…The data from each radar are sent to the Met Office headquarters and converted into a 1 km × 1 km grid of reflectivity values (Z, in mm 6 m −3 ), which are then converted to precipitation rate (R, in mm h −1 ) using the equation in Table 1 of Harrison et al (2009):…”