Development of a virtual radar environment

The CSU-CHILL radar facility has embarked on an initiative to enable the real time operation of the radar over the Internet called VCHILL or Virtual CHILL. The concept of operation over the Internet can be implemented at several levels. The simplest one is to make the routine CHILL images available on the Internet as soon as the scans are completed. This type of data dissemination has been available with CSU-CHILL over 5 years. However such images are clearly not sufficient for aircraft coordination or actively conducting coordinated scans with rapid updates. The VCHILL initiative has a more ambitious goal of providing the same quality of service (QoS) at remote locations as at the radar site. In addition, the goal of the VCHILL initiative is to provide the educational experience of polarimetric radar at a remote location, without compromising on features of an on-site radar console. This paper describes some progresses and plans of the VCHILL initiative.