Overview

The development of the ProRad software system started late 2005, and the first operational version was installed at met.no in June 2008. The parts of ProRad developed for processing polar volume data are currently pre-operational, and will be made operational early January 2012.

ProRad in it's current configuration is capable of making mosaics, or composites, from 2D products, process polar volume data, produce 2D products from processed volume data to mention a few highlights.

The processing suite for 2D data and polar volumes includes

• VPR correction
• clutter classification (sea, ground, sun flare - not tested for RLAN interference)
• blockage calculation for 2D products and polar volumes
• precipitation classification - currently based on NWP data
• accumulations
• projections of 2D products (Proj4)

The ProRad meta-data structure and ProRad XML file format used for storing 2D products and polar volumes, contains flags for storing information on

• clutter classification (e.g. sun flare, sea clutter, ground clutter)
• clutter probability
• beam block percent (geometric)
• precipitation classification (NWP based classification)

ProRad is a software system for processing radar data.

The system has a wide range of capabilities ranging from clutter filtering polar volumes to generating mosaics, or composites, from 2D products or datasets.

ProRad consist of a collection of specialised programs each handling a limited set of operations on the supplied datasets. Combined these programs provide a powerful tool for processing radar data, and synchronisation of the processing is handled through message passing between the programs. The messages are basically an announcement of data, or products, and some metadata to identify the dataset.