Improvements on the Aries-C weather radar Tuscany network

Tuscany regional government has improved the real time weather monitoring system by setting up a regional weather radar network, to provide an useful hydro-geological risk reduction instrument to the civil protection emergency system. The fully automated regional radar network is constituted by three ARIES-C systems which are fully coherent Doppler weather radars, operating in C-band with very reduced size and relative simple architecture. This work has been focused firstly in the implementation and management of an automated radar now-casting service system conceived to support the weather forecast activities. Secondly, a series of studies have been made to improve provided services quality and reliability and to stress the systems capabilities. A procedure for real time updating reflectivity mosaic synthetic products has been developed. The computational algorithm improves the accuracy of the final maps by taking advantage of an high resolution Digital Terrain Model (DTM) which allows to mitigate the single radar beam blockage effects. Data quality and reliability have been tested by a series of comparison with heterogeneous datasets: raingauge network, lightning information, multispectral satellites data and derived products. The products derived from this study give a good capability of precipitation Phenomena detection and tracking their evolution.