Flash Flood Warning System Using X-Band Dual-Polarizationradar

author’s name

Flash Flood Warning System Using X-band Dual-PolarizationRadar

Bong-Joo Jang, Dong-Ryul Lee*, Hui-Seong Noh, Dong-Pil Kim, and Sanghun Lim

Hydro Science and Engineering Research Institute, Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology, Goyang-si, Republic of Korea

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Abstract

Since 2000 in Korea, extreme weather events and sudden weather disasters have beenoccurred frequently. Today,loss of life and property damage caused by urban flash floods in Seoul and the othermetropolitan cities are increasing rapidly. However, because most of thetorrential rainfalls are mostly generated and grown up at low altitude atmosphere and their life cycles are only just 2~3 hours, an existing Korean weather observation system has much difficulty in forecasting of these types of rainfall. To deal with this problem, several Korean government-related organizations are planning construction of an urban X-band radar network for low altitude weather observation.Meanwhile, the weather radar is good to survey weather phenomenon and to predict directions of precipitation echoes covering a wide scope at once. The purpose of this research is to develop a much simplified and more accurate disaster monitoring and nowcastingsystem using theX-band dual polarization radar system that is specialized to weather phenomenon than existing systems.Accordingly, this researchpresentsa method to warn the flash flood in urban areas automatically by monitoring the estimatedquantitative precipitation from X-band radar data. The researchalso presentsan accurate 3D QPE-GIS matching technique using Google Earth platform[1] to track and warn the exact location where severeweather phenomena are occurring. The warning system proposed in this research consists of three technical tools - radar data analysis tool, risk decision tool, and risk warning/display tool. To simulate the flash flood warning system, QPE from X-band radar data was calculated by CSU algorithm[2], and radar reflectivity/QPE images were displayed. Then, precipitation represented by 3D cube blocks on Google Earth was accumulated, simultaneously.Furthermore, flash floodwarning messages by updating accumulated precipitation per unit from analyzed X-band radar datawere also displayed. As improving technical tools on the proposedwarning system from now on, the system is expected to help to monitor the massive data from the large-scale weather radar network and to forecastmeteorological disasters.

Keywords

Flash Flood; Weather Radar; Flood Warning System;Urban Flood

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by grants from Strategic Research Projects ‘Development of Flood Warning and Snowfall Estimation Platform using Hydrological Radars’ funded by the Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology.

References

[1]Google Earth, (accessed July, 2, 2016).

[2] Wang, Y., & Chandrasekar, V. (2010). Quantitative precipitation estimation in the CASA X-band dual-polarization radar network. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 27(10), 1665-1676.