Overview of Radar Data Compression

Radar data is routinely transmitted in real-time from the coterminous United States (CONUS) radar sites and placed on the Internet for incorporation into nowcasting, hydrology and modeling applications in near-realtime. Radar data are also archived for on-demand retrieval by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC). Data compression is used operationally to reduce bandwidth and storage requirements. There are several data compression techniques used operationally on radar data. Custom compression techniques have been devised for radar data that outperform generic techniques but the radar operations groups ultimately use off-the-shelf solutions. The underlying ideas behind compressibity are useful beyond just reducing the amount of data for transmission and archival. The compressibility of radar data has been found useful for devising quality control algorithms, especially for the detection and removal of test patterns.