Category: News

w2qcnndp now handles Sun Spikes and Electronic Interference

Posted in News on by Lak.

w2qcnndp is a WDSS-II algorithm that employs polarimetric moments to do quality-control of weather radar reflectivity data.  Single-pol QC (via w2qcnn) has lots of problems distinguishing bioscatter from light precipitation, but polarimetric moments (variance of Zdr, especially) help w2qcnndp outperform w2qcnn in terms of removing bioscatter. If you are using w2qcnn on US weather radar data from after the polarimetric upgrade, you should definitely start using w2qcnndp instead.

w2qcnndp used to have lots of problems with electronic interference and with sun spikes.  Recently, we added two modules to w2qcnndp (they are turned on by default; use -m “-sunstrobe -electronicinterference” to turn these off).  Here are a couple of examples to show the impact of these modules.

First, electronic interference:

Raw data from KEWX
Raw data from KEWX
QCed KEWX data
QCed KEWX data

w2qcnndp used to have problems with sun spikes (sun strobes) that were connected to valid echoes, but this has been improved:

Raw data from KTHX
Raw data from KTHX
QCed KHTX data
QCed KHTX data

For more details about w2qcnndp, please refer to the following two scientific articles:

V. Lakshmanan, C. Karstens, J. Krause, and L. Tang, “Quality control of weather radar data using polarimetric variables,” J. Atm. Ocea. Tech.,

V. Lakshmanan, C. Karstens, K. Elmore, S. Berkseth, and J. Krause, “Which polarimetric variables are important for weather/no-weather discrimination?,” J. Atmos. Ocean. Tech.

What’s this blog about?

Posted in News on by Lak.

Users of WDSS-II range from students and researchers who download WDSS-II from the wdssii.org website, engineers at private companies that license WDSS-II from the University to forecasters at government agencies and meteorological departments.

A question that I often get from users of WDSS-II is: “What’s new? What have you done in the past X months?”.  This blog is an attempt to answer that. We will add examples of changes we have made to small parts of the system, the sort of changes that can go unnoticed in a system where the names of the tools and algorithms tend to remain the same but the tools get more and more powerful and the algorithms more and more skillful.

Another purpose of this blog is to point WDSS-II users to tips and tricks. If you have a cool way to use or customize a WDSS-II application, please consider contributing a guest post.

Questions about use of the software or products, however, should be posted on the WDSS-II forum.

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