KWAJEX Radar Rainmaps
The University of Washington Mesoscale Group creates accumulated
rainmaps from the Kwajalein GV site using all available radar data
(8-12 minute resolution). If a time period has less than 75% of
possible data it is labeled partial and no accumulated rainmap is
created. The radar reflectivity data is converted to rainrate using a
single climatological Z-R (Z=175R1.5). A gap filling
algorithm is employed to account for missing data and climatological
convective and stratiform reflectivity profiles are applied to correct
for the height of the lowest beam above the ground. Documentation of
the algorithm is available in pdf format here.
For a sense of the rainfall during KWAJEX, the following are the
monthly rainmaps for the KWAJEX time period:
| July 1999 | August 1999 | September 1999 |
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The 3 hour accumulations available to the left are masked by the
variational analysis domain (see the KWAJEX LH mainpage). The
following examples illustrate the effect of the masking. The data
centered on Kwajalein out to a 17 km radius are removed to avoid
spurious rain measurements from surface clutter.
| Total GV area | With mask |
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