Realtime WSR-88D Radar Data Over the Internet/NGI (CRAFT)

Kevin Kelleher
OAR/National Severe Storms Laboratory

The National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) is collaborating with the University of Oklahoma Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS), National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), UNIDATA, UCAID Abilene, Forecast Systems Laboratory (FSL), the University of Washington, and the NWS Radar Operations Center for the realtime transport of WSR-88D radar data via the Internet and Next Generation Internet (NGI) on a project called Collaborative Radar Acquisition Field Test (CRAFT). Additional collaborators and organizations that will benefit directly include NOAA Research's Sea Grant Extension (both headquarters and the North and South Carolina offices), Salt River Project (SRP) in Phoenix, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and the University of North Carolina.



The project is an experiment in the realtime compression, internet-based transmission, and realtime delivery of WSR-88D Level II base data from multiple radars to users. It makes innovative use of advanced data compression schemes, UNIDATA's LDM transmission protocol, and the NSSL RIDDS interface to the WSR-88D radar. CRAFT is national in scope with goals 1) to improve upon the current 65% archival rate of Level II base data at NCDC, 2) to reduce the costs to NOAA in the collection, dissemination, and archival of the data, 3) to provide a realtime mechanism for bringing the data to the end users via the Internet and NGI, and 4) to measure the traffic patterns and model the network behavior to analyze its vulnerability to fault conditions and develop algorithms for fault-tolerant operation.

I will describe the recent progress made in expanding the network from six original radars in central Oklahoma to nearly 20 radars. The discussion will include future plans for the CRAFT project and how it may be extended to use some of the FAA radars.

BIO - Kevin Kelleher 01/01 Deputy Director, NSSL 09/98 Chief Information Officer, NSSL 05/97 OAR Acting Chief Information Officer 03/93 Manager, Central Support Services, NSSL 03/90 Manager, Scientific Computing Facilities, NSSL 07/88 Systems Analyst, NSSL 04/87 Research Associate, Meteorology, CIMMS/NSSL 04/86 Chief of Data Processing, Jubail Hospital, Saudi Arabia 10/84 Senior Programmer Financial Software Team, Dammam, Saudi Arabia 06/83 Computer Operations Manager, Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia 09/79 Grad. Assistant Meteorology, University of Oklahoma

Conference Center - Paper Tuesday - 1:00 - 1:20 P.M.