Typical Use Cases
Moderate Accuracy with High Data Availability in Stable Radar Operation
The default Zdrcal configuration settings aim at moderate accuracy (warning threshold at 0.3 dB) with high data availability in stable radar operation (integration limited to 4 days, maximum).
The vertical task consists of a single sweep intended for regular repetition as part of the radar scheduler, once in an hour for example.
Initial ZDR Offset Estimation During Radar Commissioning and Start-up
Typically, a first estimate of ZDR offset is checked to confirm the radar system state.
An adequate precision suffices (warning threshold 0.4 ... 0.5 dB). The radar can be allocated full-time to Zdrcal runs, for limited time.
Operation can be interactive, typically. In this case the utility can be configured to make several sweeps, each run.
At fair weather, you can increase the number of sweeps (max 40 sweeps).
You can set the TASK Scheduler to run Zdrcal, continuously, to collect as much observations as possible, in a limited time.
High accuracy monitoring in stable radar system
Having obtained good knowledge of the proper settings and stability of the ZDR offset, you can configure the stability of the radar, Zdrcal to high accuracy and to very low false alarm rate, with some compromise on monitoring temporal coverage. To this end, it is recommend to:
- Tighten the quality thresholds (
LOG,CCR,SQI,SIG) - Apply harder Doppler filtering and tighten Zdrcal specific
quality criteria (raise
RhoHVthreshold, require more qualified gates in each ray - Discard incomplete seeps at high percentage.
Eventually, the utility can be limited to run adaptively to selected weather cases (precipitation on radar) using the mode switching feature of IRIS.