Monday, June 23, 2008 : 3:30 p.m.
Annual Precipitation Pattern over Long Island Based on Rader Data
Name: Lisha Zhou
Advisor: Gilbert N. Hanson
Accurate measurements of precipitation are very important for all rainfall-related applications. Traditionally, rain gauges physically measure rainfall accumulation at a point and generally provide good quality data for a small area. But the rain gauge networks are not capable of detecting precipitation at the resolution and extent necessary for most hydrometeorology applications.
Weather radar measurements of precipitation potentially provide rainfall data with much higher spatial and temporal resolution compared to rain gauges. The radar system (NEXRAD) consists of 159 high resolution Doppler weather radar stations throughout US and selected oversea locations. The radar system generates data every 15 minutes, with spatial resolution of 4*4 km2. The radar data (Stage III and MPE-Multi-sensor Precipitation Estimator) are available from 1996 – 2005.
We are using the radar MPE data to get the precipitation pattern over Long Island. The automated radar data processing system, which was developed by Dr.Xie and his research group in UTSA, implemented by using commercial GIS and a number of Perl scripts and C/C++ programs. Results for 2004 MPE data show more rainfall on areas of higher elevation. In order to evaluate the accuracy of the radar results, I compared the 2004 MPE results with rain gauge results for 11 stations on Long Island. There was good agreement. The annual radar rainfall was on average about 5% less than that for the rain gauges.
Lisha Zhou, State University of New York at Stony Brook Graduate Student of Geosciences at Stony Brook University since Sep, 2006. Undergraduate study at Jilin University of China. 2001-2005
2008 NGWA Conference on Eastern Regional Ground Water Issues