Efficient Storage of Weather Radar Data

Weather radars produce large amounts of data and this has important implications for the archiving and analysis of data. The need for methods to deal with weather radar data sets will only increase as the United States National Weather Service (NWS) continues deployment of its 137 WSR-88D radars as part of the NEXRAD program. In this article we describe a compression and archiving strategy for weather radar data and present results for 62 days of reflectivity data from a radar operated by the NWS, as well as results for 60 days of reflectivity data for a radar operated by the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia. In their original format, these two sets require 60 GB of storage. In the format we describe, they require 4.8 GB and the data is portable across many platforms. The software for manipulating the converted data is simple, efficient, and easy to implement in C or Fortran. The savings in disk space and reduction in reading time compare favorably with what is attainable with deflation, the algorithm used in the popular gzip compression program. ©1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.