Titan/CIDD
Installation for UAE
The data display and archival capabilities of the UAE radars were upgraded with the TITAN and CIDD software (Dixon and Weiner, 1993), and were networked into the DWRS office.
With TITAN, the characteristics of rainstorms are capable of being monitored to understand:
- The large-scale organization of the storms
- Their frequency of occurrence
- Their spatial distribution in the area of study
- Their history of size and intensity
An essential part of the radar analysis involved determining the number of storms occurring over the various areas of the UAE, in order to establish:
- The length of time required to perform a later randomized experiment for quantitatively describing the potential rainfall increase from seeding
- The needs of operational aircraft in treating these storms in a timely manner
- The areal extent of rainfall increases that might be possible from seeding
- Rainfall characteristics for input into hydrological models
Long-term records of TITAN radar data can be stored on a single computer disk for later analysis and evaluation, making it a very convenient and useful archival and research tool.
One purpose of the software upgrade and networking of radars was to provide a national precipitation product, allowing for a centralized radar data archive. This activity was coordinated through the DWRS. Data from the UAE radars were collected in volume-scan mode, using the TITAN software system. In the case of convective storms, the TITAN system identifies each storm seen by the radar, tags it with a specific identifier, determines the storm properties (such as height, volume, area, centroid, intensity, rainfall, speed of motion), and tracks it over the ground. TITAN can be used to predict the future location and intensity of a storm by looking at its historical trend (although this aspect is not pivotal to the current work). The type of storms responsible for the bulk of the rainfall (such as their dynamical organization) can also be documented.
Using TITAN, the typical lifetimes, sizes, and intensities of storms can be determined, in order to put these Arabian storms in the context of storms observed in other parts of the world. Most important rain events are thought to be primarily convective in nature, but some stratiform rain may also occur. The latter is probably not a suitable candidate for hygroscopic seeding. Among the convective storms, it is important to find out whether they are primarily embedded in stratiform clouds, organized in individual convective units, or tend to occur in organized lines. For example, if there is a predominance of line storms, then it may be necessary to adopt a slightly different method of objectively characterizing the convective unit from what has been used in other recent seeding projects.
