Accomplishments, challenges and opportunities in developing network based radar systems for high-impact small-scale weather events

CASA (Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere) is an NSF Engineering Research Center dedicated to revolutionizing our ability to observe, understand, predict, and respond to hazardous weather events, especially in the lower atmosphere. The center has pursued an innovative densely networked sensing paradigm, called DCAS (Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing), to overcome the resolution and coverage limitations of traditional weather radars using low cost, densely networked radar systems. CASA built a demonstration testbed (IP1) where the CASA concepts were successfully demonstrated. The accomplishments, challenges and opportunities for further activities of the CASA IP1 testbed are described, along with lessons learned.