AWOC Instructional Component

Of all the lessons in the Data Quality portion of AWOC, IC Core 4, Lesson 1 should be the one you are most familiar with. This will be a very brief review of AP, Range Folding, and Improperly Dealiased Velocities, focusing on the impacts each has on operations and emergency managers. You will be directed to the WDTB web site for training resources that focus on radar data quality mitigation techniques.

We describe four GOES satellite data quality issues that have an important impact on warning operations:
1. satellite parallax correction,
2. satellite effective resolution,
3. temporal resolution,
4. and derived product imagery.
We present a simple technique for correcting parallax errors and computing an effective resolution that you can apply at your CWA.

The VCP Explorer, version 2, is a java-based tool to help you learn more about how the volume scans in the WSR-88Ds and the TDWRs interact with the surrounding topography. Additional capabilities have been added to show you:

1. How the vertical sampling of many VCPs affects vertical reflectivity profile-based derived products (e.g., the Hail Detection Algorithm) of a storm with a vertical reflectivity profile that you can control.
2. How nonstandard atmospheres affect beam top, middle and bottom ray paths.

The accompanying jobsheet guides you through the functions of the VCP Explorer V2. This is an optional exercise with no tests*.

*Note that the VCP Explorer is a resource intensive program made such so as to be cross-platform between Windows and LINUX computers. You should preferably have 768 mb of RAM or more and greater than 64 mb of video RAM (NVIDIA video cards work well). LINUX Redhat 9.x, Windows 2000 or greater are the preferred operating systems. Less power computers can still run the VCP Explorer but please refrain from running the the beam blockage routines or beam filling tools.