Course: Optimal use of radar data in severe storm nowcasting

Many European countries have been installing state-of-the-art dual-polarimetric radars, which greatly improve our ability to nowcast convective storms and their associated hazards. This also means it is very important to learn how to use this tool most effectively and how to link this tool to our understanding of how storm and their hazards work. This course aims to link the most recent knowledge on the convective storm dynamics and processes leading to different hazards with how these can be viewed using the radar data.

We will start the course by introducing all the basic radar variables and how they depend on the type of radar used. We will also discuss some common problems, such as radial velocity dealiasing and data filtering, that make the effective use of radar data complicated, and how to overcome such problems. Then, we will look at the individual convective storm types, their radar signatures, and how…