Twenty Years of NCAR Radar Data from Field Campaigns

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Earth Observing Laboratory (EOL) has collected data in hundreds of field campaigns over several decades. EOL data is available from a state of the art data archive and is free of charge to the scientific community. As part of EOL, the Remote Sensing Facility (RSF) has deployed several radars all over the world and collected high quality data from both airborne and ground based platforms. In this presentation we will introduce the data from two currently active radars, the ground based S-PolKa and the airborne HIAPER Cloud Radar (HCR) to encourage their use in climate studies.

The S-PolKa radar is an advanced, transportable, dual-polarized, dual-wavelength Doppler weather radar. S-PolKa transmits 10 cm wavelength (S-band) and 0.86 cm wavelength (K a -band) simultaneously with matched beamwidths and range resolution, making it the only S-band transportable radar worldwide, which is available to the scientific community, and is capable of looking into the core of deep convection. It has been deployed for more than 20 years and on four continents. Consistent data quality control procedures which have been refined and improved over the years, several derived scientific products, such as particle identification and rain accumulation, make the data an excellent resource for weather and climate model validation and research.

HCR is a newer airborne instrument but has already been deployed in four field campaigns reaching from the Southern Ocean to the tropics of Central America. It is a polarimetric, millimeter-wavelength radar which offers unique observations on the formation and evolution of clouds that can provide critical understanding about the interactions between aerosols and clouds and the radiative effects of clouds on global and regional climate.