Steve Ansari, NOAA/NESDIS/NCDC, Asheville, NC; and S. A. Del Greco, H.
Frederick, and B. R. Nelson
NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) archives Weather Surveillance
Radar, 1988 Doppler (WSR-88D) data from the national network of ~160 NWS, DOD
and FAA sites. These are commonly referred to as Next-Generation Doppler Radars
(NEXRAD). The NCDC NEXRAD Archive contains over 1000 terabytes of volume scan
data, known as Level-II, and derived products, known as Level-III. Several of
the products in the NEXRAD Level-III data stream are point features describing
general storm structure, hail, mesocyclone and tornado signatures. The NCDC
developed software package, Java NEXRAD Tools, is used to decode these features
into an Oracle Spatial geodatabase. The NEXRAD Severe Weather Inventory (NSWI)
provides user access to the geodatabase via the NCDC web page, Web Feature
Services (WFS) or OPeNDAP. The results of interactive web page queries may be
saved in a variety of formats, including plain text, XML, NetCDF and Shapefile.