Dear community,
At the Flanders Environment Agency, we’re maintaining a dual pol C band radar at Helchteren which is used for generating qpe for Belgium in collaboration with the Belgian royal met office (RMI). The scan settings for the radar in Helchteren are optimized for precipitation estimation, having a range of 200 km and 12 elevations from 0.3 to 25° at a PRF of 550 Hz. Our colleagues at the met office (RMI) operate different scan settings in which a long range scan is interleaved with a shorter range scan at higher PRF to avoid velocity folding.
We would like to investigate aligning our scan strategies and for this we would like to perform some kind of assessment of the impact of say adopting the interleaved scan strategy on the QPE estimation. Are there people in the community which have past experience with such a quantitative assessement ? Are people aware of simulation tools which would aid in such an assessment ? And would people be willing to share these experiences ? There is obviously the option of actually testing & comparing during a few precipitation events, however, people are reluctant to change operational settings and I would also like to be able to go beyond a few short term tests.
I’m fairly new to the field of dual pol weather radars, but I have been using wradlib & xradar and I’m not afraid of some heavy python lifting, so if people can point me in the right direction - even conceptually - on how to quantify the impact, that would be very much appreciated.
With kind regards,
Bino Maiheu
Flanders Environment Agency
