Building a terabyte NEXRAD radar database for hydrometeorology research

The management and processing of terabyte-scale radar data sets is time-consuming, costly, and an impediment to research. Researchers require rapid and transparent access to the data without being encumbered with the technical challenges of data management. In this paper, we describe a database architecture that manages over 12 TB (and growing) of Archive Level II data that is produced by the United States National Weather Service's network of WSR-88D weather radars. The contribution of this work is an automatic system for archiving and analyzing radar data that isolates geoscientists from the complexities of data storage and retrieval. Data access transparency is achieved by using a relational database to store metadata on the raw data, which enables simple SQL queries to retrieve data subsets of interest. The second component is a distributed web platform that cost-effectively distributes data across web servers for access using the ubiquitous HTTP protocol. This work demonstrates how massive data sets can be effectively queried and managed.