Studies on a High-Compression Technique for Weather Radar Reflectivity Data

Studies are carried out on a contour-based method for highly compressing voluminous weather radar reflectivity data to optimize the compression and reconstruction parameters. In particular, the effects of the choice of thresholds and the degree of smoothing at encoding and retrieval ends are studied with respect to achievable compression ratios, root-mean-square error of the retrieved contours, and the visual fidelity of the reconstructed reflectivity images. Results are presented for multiple actual Doppler weather radar reflectivity data sets