Journal article
Scale Dependence of Radar Rainfall Uncertainty: Initial Evaluation of NEXRAD’s New Super-Resolution Data for Hydrologic Applications
Journal of hydrometeorology, Vol.11(5), pp.1191-1198
10/01/2010
DOI: 10.1175/2010JHM1265.1
Abstract
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.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Scale Dependence of Radar Rainfall Uncertainty: Initial Evaluation of NEXRAD’s New Super-Resolution Data for Hydrologic Applications
- Creators
- Bong-Chul Seo - IIHR-Hydroscience and Engineering, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, IowaWitold F Krajewski - IIHR-Hydroscience and Engineering, The University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Journal of hydrometeorology, Vol.11(5), pp.1191-1198
- DOI
- 10.1175/2010JHM1265.1
- ISSN
- 1525-755X
- eISSN
- 1525-7541
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 10/01/2010
- Academic Unit
- Civil and Environmental Engineering; IIHR--Hydroscience and Engineering
- Record Identifier
- 9983991982002771
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