Radar thus offers the potential as a tool not only for tracking severe weather, but also for estimating the amount of precipitation. Conventional radar displays show the energy reflected off of objects in the range of the radar including birds, airplanes, the ground, and water droplets or ice crystals or snow in the atmosphere. For weather purposes, you want to remove non-precipitation echoes, which can contaminate estimates. NOWrad, WSI s doppler radar mosaic product, provides this critical precipitation-only data to work with. For precipitation, the amount of energy in the return echo is proportional to the intensity of the precipitation.
Heavy precipitation reflects more energy back to the radar than light precipitation.
This is because there is more reflecting surfaces when heavy precipitation is occurring. Because of this, radar can be used for estimating rainfall or snowfall amounts. One of the other big advantages is the density of coverage. This is much greater than that enabled by the rain gauge networks. There are just 700 real-time hourly observing stations across the country and 4000 reliable climatological data recording points with daily information in the national Climate Prediction Center network.