HURRICANE AND SEVERE STORM SENTINEL (HS3) HIGH-ALTITUDE IMAGING WIND AND RAIN AIRBORNE PROFILER (HIWRAP) V1

The Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) High-Altitude Imaging Wind and Rain dataset was collected from the High-altitude Imaging Wind and Rain Airborne Profiler (HIWRAP), which is a dual-frequency (Ku- and Ka-band, or approximately 14 and 35 GHz), dual-beam (30 degree and 40 degree incidence angle), conically scanning radar that has been designed for the Global Hawk aircraft during the HS3 campaign. Goals for HS3 included: assessing the relative roles of large-scale environment and storm-scale internal processes; and addressing the controversial role of the Saharan Air Layer (SAL) in tropical storm formation and intensification as well as the role of deep convection in the inner-core region of storms. HIWRAP uses solid state transmitters along with a novel pulse compression scheme that results in a system that is considerably more compact and requires less power than typical radars used for precipitation and wind measurements. By conically scanning at 10-20 rpm, its beams sweeped below the Global Hawk collecting Doppler velocity/reflectivity profiles. The unique HIWRAP sampling and phase correction strategy implemented (frequency diversity Doppler processing technique). HIWRAP's dual-wavelength operation enables it to map full tropospheric winds from cloud and precipitation volume backscatter measurements, derive information about precipitation drop-size distributions, and estimate the ocean surface winds using scatterometry techniques. Winds will be retrieved using a gridding approach similar to well-established ground-based multi-Doppler radar wind analyses. More information can be found at http://har.gsfc.nasa.gov/index.php?section