Making numerical weather predictions portable compression of weather data for use in radar propagation modeling

Would it be possible to reduce large numerical weather predictions to the size of an email attachment? This question was given a positive answer in a recent internship after which a prototype for (de-)compression was tested in two field experiments. Large volumes of weather were shown to be reduced to less than a percent of the original datasets but this came with the price of information loss. In this study a method for lossy compression of weather data is described by representing the data as a sparse and adaptive subset. Adaptive sampling is then solving an optimization problem for the minimal loss of information for applications in radar propagation modeling.