GCIP/LSA-NW 99 WSI NIDS Radar Data 1.0 General Description The GCIP/LSA-NW 99 WSI NIDS Radar Data Set contains several WSR-88D Level III products that were archived from the Weather Systems International (WSI) NEXRAD (now WSR-88D) Information Dissemination Service (NIDS) datastream during the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX) Continental-scale International Project (GCIP) Large Scale Area - North West (LSA-NW) Enhanced Annual Observing Period - 1999 (LSA/NW 99). This experiment was conducted in the area 36 - 51 North Latitude and 90 - 115 West Longitude during the time period 1 April 1999 - 31 March 2000. 2.0 Detailed Data Description This dataset contains base reflectivity and velocity at the four lowest tilts, composite reflectitivity, and Vertical Azimuth Display (VAD) wind profiles from five sites. The sites are listed below. 2.1 Station List for WSI NIDS Products ID Site ST LAT LON ELEV ------------------------------------------------------------- KBLX Billings MT 45 51 14 -108 36 24 1097.0 KLNX North Platte NE 41 57 28 -100 34 35 905.5 KRIW Riverton WY 43 03 58 -108 28 38 1697.6 KUDX Rapid City SD 44 07 30 -102 49 47 919.5 Lat/Lon in degrees minutes seconds. Elevation in meters. 2.2 Data Remarks This dataset is contained on one exabyte tape per week. This tape contains one UNIX tar file for each UTC day on the tape. The structure inside of each tar file is the same. Each tar file contains one directory per station (see abbreviations above). Each station directory contains on subdirectory per product. These directories are named as follows: BREF1 Base Reflectivity at 0.5 degree BREF2 Base Reflectivity at 1.5 degrees BREF3 Base Reflectivity at next tilt BREF4 Base Reflectivity at next tilt VEL1 Velocity at 0.5 degree VEL2 Velocity at 1.5 degrees VEL3 Velocity at next tilt VEL4 Velocity at next tilt CREF Composite Reflectivity STAT Radar status messages VAD Vertical Azimuth Display Within each directory, the filename for each file is composed as follows: YYYYMMDD_hhmm_PPPPP.SSS Where: YYYY is the year of observation MM is the month of observation hh is the hour of observation mm is the minute of observation PPPPP is the product abbreviation SSS is the station id (without K). Each individual file is in WSI NIDS format. 3.0 Quality Control Processing No additional quality control was performed on the data by the UCAR/JOSS. There are some gaps in the data due to loss of the real-time data feed.