Arkansas-Red Basin River Forecast Center (ABRFC)

Information updated on November 5, 2008, 8:19 pm GMT


General Data Description

The ABRFC area of responsibility includes the drainage area of the Arkansas River above Pine Bluff Arkansas and the drainage area of the Red River above Fulton Arkansas. This comprises over 208,000 square miles and includes Oklahoma and portions of six neighboring states. Every hour a gridded (4 km x 4 km) precipitation field is created. This field is a combination of both WSR-88D Nexrad radar precipitation estimates and raingauge reports.

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Data Stream Names

Measurement Description

For each grid point, the amount of precipitation in the previous hour in units of 0.01 mm is provided.

Temporal Coverage

Data are available as hourly files beginning with 1994-06-24, hr 15:00Z.

Data are quality assured by automated processes or ABRFC staff within 6 hr of observation and available at the ARM Archive within a few days after the date of the file.

Area Covered

The data are provided on the HRAP grid. The grid cell boundary coordinates as computed by hrap.c are available in hrap_latlon.out.gz and removing the offset of the ABRFC area relative to HRAP in abrfc_latlon.dat.gz. The latter also includes a c-code fragment to read the grid into longitude and latitude arrays corresponding the precipitation array found in the netCDF files.

The area covered is bounded by:
bottom_left,bottom_right,top_right,top_left =
latitude - 33.603, 32.433, 38.027, 39.42
longitude - 106.456, 92.322, 90.678, 106.652

Data Stream Inputs

Data are provided as netCDF files from ABRFC, they currently do NOT conform to ARM DOD conventions.

Notification Form Link

Notification Form

Related Links

ABRFC Web Page

Contacts

Data Source

  • Institution
    • National Weather Service Arkansas-Red Basin River Forecast Center

Processing History

The ABRFC performs extensive quality control on these data.

Acronyms

ABRFC
Arkansas-Red Basin River Forecast Center
HRAP
The Hydrologic Rainfall Analysis Project (HRAP) grid as defined by Greene and Hudlow (1982) is used to define the location of each average precipitation value in a NEXRAD StageIII data set. The HRAP cell coordinates are defined in the image plane of a secant polar Stereographic map projection on a spherical, Earth-centered datum of radius 6371.2 km. The secant polar Stereographic projection has a standard (true) latitude of 60° North and a standard longitude (longitude of the projection center) of 105° West. In other words, features on the Earth's surface are projected onto a plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation and passing through the Earth at fg = 60°.
WSR
Weather Surveillance Dopper Radar

Citable References