TITLE:
Real Time Monitoring of Extreme Rainfall Events with Simple X-Band Mini Weather Radar
AUTHORS:
Silvano Bertoldo, Claudio Lucianaz, Marco Allegretti, Giovanni Perona
KEYWORDS:
X-Band Radar, Extreme Rainfall Event, Precipitation Monitoring, High Temporal Resolution, High Spatial Resolution, Real Time Monitoring, Single Polarization
JOURNAL NAME:
Atmospheric and Climate Sciences,
Vol.6 No.2,
April
21,
2016
ABSTRACT: Real time
rainfall events monitoring is very important for a large number of reasons: Civil
Protection, hydrogeological risk management, hydroelectric power purposes, road
and traffic regulation, and tourism. Efficient monitoring operations need
continuous, high-resolution and large-coverage data. To monitor and observe
extreme rainfall events, often much localized over small basins of interest,
and that could frequently causing flash floods, an unrealistic extremely dense
rain gauge network should be needed. On the other hand, common large C-band or
S-band long range radars do not provide the necessary spatial and temporal
resolution. Simple short-range X-band mini weather radar can be a valid
compromise solution. The present work shows how a single polarization,
non-Doppler and non-coherent, simple and low cost X-band radar allowed
monitoring three very intense rainfall events occurred near Turin during July
2014. The events, which caused damages and floods, are detected and monitored
in real time with a sample rate of 1 minute and a radial spatial resolution of
60 m, thus allowing to describe the intensity of the precipitation on each
small portion of territory. This information could be very useful if used by
authorities in charge of Civil Protection in order to avoid inconvenience to
people and to monitor dangerous situations.