A Network of X-Band Meteorological Radars to Support the Motorway System (Campania Region Meteorological Radar Network Project)

he transport sector and road infrastructures are very sensitive to the issues connected to the atmospheric conditions. The latter constitute a source of relevant risk, especially for roads running in mountainous areas, where a wide spectrum of meteorological phenomena, such as rain showers, snow, hail, wind gusts and ice, threatens drivers’ safety. In such contexts, to face out critical situations it is essential to develop a monitoring system that is able to capillary surveil specific sectors or very small basins, providing real time information that may be crucial to preserve lives and assets. In this work, we present the results of the “Campania Region Meteorological Radar Network”, which is focused on the development of X-band radar-based meteorological products that can support highway traffic management and maintenance. The X-band measurements provided by two single-polarization systems, properly integrated with the observations supplied by disdrometers and conventional automatic weather stations, were involved in the following main tasks: (i) the development of a radar composite product; (ii) the devise of a probability of hail index; (iii) the real time discrimination of precipitation type (rain, mixed and snow); (iv) the development of a snowfall rate estimator. The performance of these products was assessed for two case studies, related to a relevant summer hailstorm (which occurred on 1 August 2020) and to a winter precipitation event (which occurred on 13 February 2021). In both cases, the X-band radar-based tools proved to be useful for the stakeholders involved in the management of highway traffic, providing a reliable characterization of precipitation events and of the fast-changing vertical structure of convective cells

VAS demonstration: (VISSR Atmospheric Sounder) description

The VAS Demonstration (VISSR Atmospheric Sounder) is a project designed to evaluate the VAS instrument as a remote sensor of the Earth's atmosphere and surface. This report describes the instrument and ground processing system, the instrument performance, the valiation as a temperature and moisture profiler compared with ground truth and other satellites, and assesses its performance as a valuable meteorological tool. The report also addresses the availability of data for scientific research

Optimal redistribution of the background ozone monitoring stations over France

International audienceOzone is a harmful air pollutant at ground level, and its concentrations are routinely measured with monitoring networks. The network design problem aims at determining the optimal positioning of the monitoring stations. In this study, the background stations of the French routine pollution monitoring network (BDQA) are partially redistributed over France under a set of design objectives. These background stations report ozone variations at large spatial scale comparable with that of a chemistry-transport model (CTM). The design criterion needs to be defined on a regular grid that covers France, where in general no ozone observations are available for validation. Geostatistical ozone estimation methods are used to extrapolate concentrations to these grid nodes. The geostatistical criteria are introduced to minimize the theoretical error of those geostatistical extrapolations. A physical criterion is also introduced to measure the ability of a network to represent a physical ozone field retrieved from CTM simulations using geostatistical extrapolation methods. A third type of criteria of geometrical nature, e.g. a maximal coverage of the design domain, are based uniquely on the distance between the network stations. To complete the network design methodology, a stochastic optimization method, simulated annealing, is employed in the algorithm to select optimally the stations. Significant improvement with all the proposed criteria has been found for the optimally redistributed network against the original background BDQA network. For instance, the relative improvements in the physical criterion value range from 21% to 32% compared to randomly relocated networks. Different design criteria lead to different optimally relocated networks. The optimal networks under physical criteria are the most heterogeneously distributed. More background stations are displaced to the coast, frontiers, and large urban agglomerations, e.g. Paris and Marseilles. The ozone heterogeneous fields are not as well reconstructed from optimal networks under geostatistical or geometrical criteria as from the optimal network obtained with the physical criterion. The values of the physical criterion for the geostatistically and geometrically optimal networks show deteriorations of about 8% and 17% respectively compared to that of the physically optimal network