Detecting weather radar clutter using satellite-based nowcasting products

This contribution presents some initial results from investigations into detection of weather radar clutter by data fusion with satellite-based nowcasting products. Weather radar data from three C-band Doppler weather radars of the Danish Meteorological Institute has been extracted for cases of sea and land clutter caused by anomalous propagation as well as cases of clutter free data. In addition, an operational nowcasting product developed by the Nowcasting Satellite Application Facility of EUMETSAT is used. The Precipitating Clouds product, which is based on Meteosat-8 data and auxiliary information from numerical weather predictions, provides probabilities of precipitation for every pixel in a Meteosat-8 scene. Via pixel-level image fusion of the radar data and the Precipitating Clouds product, supervised classification of the radar echoes into clutter and precipitation classes is performed. Results from classification of three typical events are shown and discussed. Cases of moderate and severe ground clutter caused by anomalous propagation is detected with high accuracies. However, misclassification of radar echoes is observed both during no-clutter precipitation events and when precipitation areas are close to areas of clutter.