The Baltic Sea Experiment (BALTEX) is the European regional project within the Global Energy and Water Cycle Experiment (GEWEX). The BALTEX Working Group on Radar (WGR) is responsible for coordinating weather radar activities within the framework of BALTEX, including the establishment and operation of a Radar Data Centre (BRDC) which can provide BALTEX with wind and precipitation datasets. This report presents the state of the WGR and the BALTEX Radar Network (BALTRAD). Those products being generated at the BRDC are presented and discussed, as are the methods used to create them.

The BALTRAD network consists of 29, mostly C-band, radars in six countries. Communications to/from the BRDC are conducted both through operational lines and through provisional lnternetbased solutions. The BRDC operates in near-real time. Individual radar images containing radar reflectivity factor (dBZ) are produced with a temporal resolution of 15 min. These are combined to create composite images, also every 15 minutes. A systematic gauge correction method is introduced for application to point observations from the synoptical network. These corrected gauge observations are used together with radar sums to create spatially continuous, gauge-adjusted threeand twelve-hour accumulations. The gauge adjustment technique is shown to minimize the bias between radar and gauge observations, while also reducing the range dependency on the radar data. All image products have horizontal resolutions of 2 km. A wind profile product is also created using VAD and VVP techniques.