The polarimetric upgrade to the weather surveillance RADAR1988 doppler (WSR-88D) network has paved the way for the development of advanced algorithm enhancements to the open radar product generator…

The polarimetric upgrade to the weather surveillance RADAR1988 doppler (WSR-88D) network has paved the way for the development of advanced algorithm enhancements to the open radar product generator (orpg; the processing environment for level-III products) for real-time operations. Among these modernizations is the hydrometeor classification algorithm (HCA), a fuzzy logic-based method for classifying the predominant scatterer within a radar gate as one of 10 possible hydrometeor types. While the HCA has shown considerable skill at identifying hydrometeor types, there are several non-hydrometeor targets that do not fit into one of the 10 categories. When incorrectly classified as a hydrometeor, these errors are passed downstream to algorithms that, in turn, treat the gates as weather, potentially causing users to misinterpret radar display information and introducing further errors in other algorithms using the data. Since the WSR-88D is a TRI-agency effort between NOAA, the federal AVI