MYRORSS: Multi-Year Radar Storm Reanalysis for the Contiguous U.S.

NOAA's Multi-Year Reanalysis of Remotely Sensed Storms (MYRORSS) provides three-dimensional radar volume data for the contiguous United States. It contains radar reflectivity and derived products like echo top heights and hail size estimates from April 1998 through December 2011. The data was processed through the Multi-Radar, Multi-Sensor framework using NEXRAD Level-II radar and Rapid Update Cycle model analyses.

Use Cases

• Analyzing long-term trends in storm intensity based on radar reflectivity data.
• Validating and improving hail forecast models using the derived hail size estimates.
• Studying storm structure and evolution with the three-dimensional radar volume data.
• Researching wind shear patterns using the processed azimuthal shear layer products.

Strengths

• Covers a multi-decade period from April 1998 to December 2011.
• Includes quality control to remove non-weather echoes and manually identified errors.
• Provides a high horizontal resolution of 0.01° by 0.01°.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Data may reflect temporal bias inherent to the 1998-2011 coverage period.
• The radar data was merged at imperfect timesteps, though generally around 5-min intervals.

Provenance

Source

NOAA

Collection Method

Radar data from the NEXRAD Level-II archive processed through the Multi-Radar, Multi-Sensor (MRMS) framework and combined with hourly forecast model analyses.

Time Range

April 1998 through December 2011

Geography

Contiguous United States