Public Information Statement
National Weather Service SAN JUAN PR Issued by National Weather Service Miami FL 239 PM AST Tue Oct 3 2017

To: Subscribers:
-Family of Services
-NOAA Weather Wire Service
-Emergency Managers Weather Information Network -NOAAPORT
-Other NWS Partners and NWS Employees

From: Southeast River Forecast Center
Subject: Update – Impacts of TJUA NEXRAD Outage on Quantitative Precipitation

Estimates

The WSR-88D NEXRAD radar on the Island of Puerto Rico was severely damaged during Hurricane Maria. A full engineering assessment is needed on the current damages to the radar. At this time, it is too early to speculate when the radar will be back online.

Hourly precipitation estimates from the WSR-88D NEXRAD radar were used to compare to ground truth rainfall gauge reports to derive a best quantitative precipitation estimate (QPE) across the island of Puerto Rico.

It is important to be aware of the quality of the data (QPE) for the duration that the radar is out of operation. With the loss of the radar, the QPEs will be based on the Hydro-Estimator (satellite plus rainfall gauge reports).

Studies have shown that algorithms which combine sensor inputs — radar, gauge, satellite — yield more accurate precipitation estimates than those which rely on a single sensor (i.e. radar-only, gauge-only, satellite-only).

Hourly QPE can be found at http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ridge2/RFC_Precip/ Daily, Monthly and Yearly QPE can be found at http://water.weather.gov/precip/