These observations are carried out by EUMETNET members or by, for example, flight companies on behalf of EUMETNET. EUMETNET has responsibility of observations that are of benefit to weather forecasting in general, such as observations made in airplanes, radio soundings on the Atlantic and remote islands, floating and moored buoys, and observations on board of ships. In Europe, the national weather services take care of surface observations, radio soundings, weather radar observations, and alike within their territory. In the following, we refer to this area as Europe, noting that Europe as a geographical continent is larger.ĮUMETNET is active in observations, forecasting, and climate issues. EUMETNET members come from countries within the European Union and Balkans, mostly lying west of 30☎. Europe belongs to the WMO regional area VI, and in this area 30 meteorological services are members of the European National Meteorological Services Network (EUMETNET). The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has advanced the exchange since its founding in the 1870s. Weather crosses national borders, and hence the exchange of weather observations is most important. The European Operational Program for Exchange of Weather Radar Information (OPERA) has worked to improve harmonization of radar systems and measurements since 1999 and has recently started production of network-wide radar mosaics. All of these reports and recommendations are publicly available on the OPERA website, for use by the wider meteorological community. Recent work has produced reports on best practices for production of radar data, on quality indicators, and on experiences with the use of polarimetric radars. Hence, the expertise of the most experienced members is made available to all members supporting the development of the network as a whole. An essential part of the OPERA work is the documentation of the members' best practices in radar operation and data production and the making of joint recommendations: for example, on the interferences caused by other microwave sources and the disturbances caused by wind turbines. Since 2011, a radar data center (“Odyssey”) has been in operation, producing network-wide radar mosaics from volumetric data. In addition, OPERA has facilitated and stimulated the exchange of radar data between its members, among others, by the development of a radar data information model and jointly agreed data formats. Within the European National Meteorological Services (EUMETNET), a grouping of services, the Operational Program for Exchange of Weather Radar Information (OPERA) has been working since 1999 on improving the harmonization of radars and their measurements. Another difference is that the density of the European weather radar network is roughly twice that of the NEXRAD network. The radar network is heterogeneous in hardware, signal processing, transmit/receive frequency, and scanning strategy, thus making it fundamentally different than the Next Generation Weather Radar (NEXRAD) network. The operational weather radar network in Europe covers more than 30 countries and contains more than 200 weather radars. The horizontal line at 5 m s −1 indicates the acceptable level. The country codes are given on the horizontal axis, and each set of points denotes one radar. This includes radars from Norway (NO) Sweden (SE) Finland (FI) United Kingdom (UK) the Netherlands (NL) Belgium (BE) France (FR) Hungary (HU) Croatia (HR) and Piemonte, Italy (IT). The results are given for the 50 radars monitored by ECMWF. Root-mean-square difference of the weather radar wind profiles and the ECMWF model profiles for January–March 2013. The black arrows in (bottom left) point out interferences caused by RLANs. The weakest echoes shown here are around −30 dB Z, as no thresholding is applied at the server side. (bottom) Data at the Odyssey server: maximum reflectivity composite (left) of raw data and (right) after cleaning the data with the new anomaly detection and removal and hit-accumulation filtering algorithms.
(top) End-user products: (left) accumulation rain rate thresholded at 0.2 mm h −1 and (right) maximum reflectivity composite thresholded at −6 dB Z. Example of the functions of the OPERA Radar Data Center–Odyssey. Sample products from the OPERA Radar Data Center–Odyssey. Research and development systems are not included. The map contains radars which EUMENET and OPERA members are using for their operational applications. The frequency bands are indicated by colors and the type of radar by the marker type as shown in the legend. Map of the European radar network in October 2013.
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