Radar reflectivity (proportional to precipitation intensity) from the Wichita, Kansas WSR-88D or Next Generation Doppler Weather radar (NEXRAD) valid at 0036 UTC (10:36 pm CDT) on 21 june 2001. Warmer colors indicate greater intensity.

The People:

Beth Plale, director
Brian Kopecky, grad student
Ning Liu, grad student
A.J. Ragusa undergrad

Contact us at plale at cs dot indiana dot edu

The Data:

130 Doppler radars (WSR-88D) around the continental US generate Doppler radar data 24x7. This data is used in real time warning of hazardous spring and winter weather, for initializing numerical weather prediction models, and for verifying the occurrence of past events, such as the location of damaging hail. But it has broader potential too. It can be used in bird and insect migration studies, bird strike avoidance, urban pollution transport, and the tracking of hazardous atmospheric releases among others.

The Project:

We are removing barriers preventing broader use of Doppler data by means of a .NET service framework for storing, operating on , and serving the data. We are building a large-scale database for Level II data. Our first phase is a pilot project aimed at the six nearest radars surrounding Bloomington, Indiana.

Storing and index large volumes of streaming data (SQL Server database)
On-the-fly metadata generation
Service Support: query, process, clean, filter, and fuse data on the fly
Authentication mechanisms to avoid denial of service abuse by over-taxing the computational resource
Workload analysis - analyze workloads of comparable services to anticipate scalability issues.