Improved monitoring of heavy rain through adaptive sensing – the SMARTER project

Meteorological radars are widely used for observing and monitoring heavy rain in urban environments. Unfortunately, the rigid scanning strategies these radars employ are not well suited for localised and rapidly developing atmospheric threats, such as those causing heavy rains. Project SMARTER – the Strategic Monitoring of Atmospheric Threats using Enhanced Radar – tackles this challenge by exploring how radar systems can dynamically adjust their scanning strategies in response to evolving threats. The ultimate goal is to develop a fully automatic control system for improving the reliability and accuracy of radar-based observations of extreme weather events.

In this study, we present preliminary findings from numerical simulations designed to quantify the benefits of adaptive scanning strategies for a single meteorological radar. We start with a simple scenario in which a single radar with a fixed rotation speed (in azimuth) observes a single convective rain cell moving along a fixed path. We then extend the simulation to include time-varying radar rotation speeds and changing rain cell characteristics.

Whilst preliminary, these first experiments lay the basis for future research in which the simulator will be extended to more complex scenarios, such as multiple rain cell clusters, or networks of radars with overlapping fields of view. These findings bring us closer to achieving our goal of developing a real-world proof of concept for nowcasting heavy rain in the Delft-Rotterdam area.