Radar - ANL Wind Profiler, Walla Walla - Raw Data

**Overview**

**Winds**
A radar wind profiler measures the Doppler shift of electromagnetic energy scattered back from atmospheric turbulence and hydrometeors along 3-5 vertical and off-vertical point beam directions. Back-scattered signal strength and radial-component velocities are remotely sensed along all beam directions and combined to derive the horizontal wind field over the radar. These data typically are sampled and averaged hourly and usually have 6-m and/or 100-m vertical resolutions up to 4 km for the 915 MHz and 8 km for the 449 MHz systems.

**Temperature**
To measure atmospheric temperature, a radio acoustic sound system (RASS) is used in conjunction with the wind profile. These data typically are sampled and averaged for five minutes each hour and have a 60-m vertical resolution up to 1.5 km for the 915 MHz and 60-m up to 3.5k m for the 449 MHz.

**Data Details**

Spectra data are stored in two daily files, a header (file names contain "H") and a data (file names contain "D") file. The (H)eader files are made up of binary data records containing information about the operational parameters of the profiler, while (D)ata files, also composed of binary data records, contain the spectra data collected by the profiler, i.e. spectral values for each spectral bin for every range gate.

**Data Quality**

Various quality control (QC) algorithms developed over the years process data in real time on the radar software layer. These algorithms, which run in real time, act on time-series, spectra, moment, and consensus data layers that are persisted in various forms. For a detailed description, refer to the attached QC document: *915 and 449 MHz Radar Wind Profilers and RASS QC*.

**Uncertainty**

The uncertainty is defined by the spacing of the spectral bin.