X- and W-band mobile Doppler radar observations from VORTEX2 and current developments

Over the past several years, UMass has developed and deployed two mobile Doppler radars for severe storm research. One is a W-band (95 GHz) Doppler radar that is used for fine-scale observations of tornadic features. It features a very narrow (0.18°) beamwidth. The other is a dual-polarized X-band Doppler radar used for coarser scale observations and polarimetric measurements for scatterer identification, and precipitation estimation. We show sample observations by these systems obtained during the 2009 and 2010 VORTEX2 experiments. UMass is presently developing a dual-polarized, solid-state, phased-array radar.