Performance enhancement of a spline-based method for extreme compression of weather radar reflectivity data

Enhancements are carried out to a contour-based method for extreme compression of weather radar reflectivity data for efficient storage and transmission over low-bandwidth data links. In particular, a new method of systematically adjusting the control points to obtain better reconstruction of the contours using B-spline interpolation is presented. Further, bit-level manipulations to achieve higher compression ratios are investigated. The efficacy of these enhancements is quantitatively evaluated with respect to achievable compression ratios and the root-mean-square error of the retrieved contours, and qualitatively assessed from the visual fidelity of the reconstructed contours. Results are presented for actual Doppler weather radar data sets