Replacement For Aging Doppler Radar Being Tested 105
longacre writes "Due to its limited range and slow scan times, the backbone of weather prediction in the US since the early 1990s, the NEXRAD radar system, is deeply flawed in the eyes of meteorologists. A new system being tested by researchers at the NOAA and four universities called the Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA) network aims to fill the holes left by NEXRAD, using radar nodes piggybacked onto existing infrastructure, such as rooftops and cell towers. From the article: 'Based on faster and more comprehensive data collection, [Distributed Collaborative Adaptive Sensing] processing can refocus the CASA radars on a particularly interesting part of a storm (like an area that looks like it might develop a tornado) without losing track of an entire storm cell. "The system is continuously diagnosing the atmosphere and reallocating resources using wireless Internet as a backbone," says [the CASA team director].' Testing has begun in Oklahoma, Houston, and Puerto Rico, and initial installations could begin in 5 years."
Stealth hunter? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2001/e20010619stealths.htm [globalsecurity.org]
Outdated information (Score:5, Informative)
From the article...
No, not so much. The National Weather Service has started issuing storm-based (polygon-area based) warnings since August 2007. Prior to that, they were county-based warnings, which were a problem (Cook County, IL being about 50 miles tall by 40 miles wide, while average tornado widths are about 100 yards) but nowhere near the "statewide warning" the article claims.
Awful FAQ here: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/sbwarnings/FAQ/engage.html [noaa.gov]
Re:Slow (Score:3, Informative)
But those radars need special software and hardware to deal with the fact that the returning signal is going to be coming from a significantly different azimuth (relative to the radar head) from where it was transmitted.
It is a lot of needless complexity and I really don't see why weather should need radars which rotate that fast.
Re:Slow (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Slow (Score:2, Informative)
What a faster system with a finer resolution will do is help better tell if that big nasty storm moving into your part of town will be an F1, or an F5 Magic Eraser.
It also will help stretch the warning leadtime. It's still not good enough.
Nexrad took the warning from pretty much after-the-fact to about +15 minutes these days. Nexrad, compared to the old-school FPS-77 and the like, is pixie dust.
The real clincher, not mentioned in TFA?
They're working on a phased-array replacement for Nexrad. Hit multiple individual cells at once. http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/research/radar/par.php [noaa.gov]
Title is misleading (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slow (Score:3, Informative)
Consumers need education on Doppler (Score:1, Informative)
Hey It's cloudy outside I cant see the sun , that stupid Doppler radar doesn't show the clouds say many people Maybe this data is wrong or old
No it inst
Doppler radar detects motion and in this case rain. The clouds simply have no falling rain in them.
You'll be surprised how many people don't know that Doppler radar does Not show clouds , it shows falling Rain ,
Maybe the weather service needs to educate he public better ?
Re:Outdated information (Score:3, Informative)
One TV news organization in our area already has one, and all of the NEXRADs that NWS uses are supposed to be replaced by like 2010.
Re:Slow (Score:5, Informative)
They take scans at
Then the radars take an "echo tops" scan where the dish moves up and down to its limits while scanning horizontal. That lets the radars detect the total height of a storm, which gives another estimate of its strength.
So, its not just the dish spinning around in a single plane.
Summary wrong in pretty much every claim (Score:5, Informative)
(1) CASA is not designed to replace the existing NEXRAD network. It is designed to supplement it. NEXRADs are designed for long-range surveillance. CASA radars see "under" the NEXRAD umbrella, up to 3km in height. The article makes this clear.
(2) NEXRAD scans are not slow. The fastest volume coverage patterns (VCPs) in NEXRAD, used in severe weather, scan the atmosphere every 4 minutes. The only thing faster is phased array radar and it is still experimental (See: http://www.oar.noaa.gov/spotlite/ [noaa.gov]). CASA radars don't have volume scans, but their antennas are about the same speed as NEXRAD's.
(3) NEXRAD is not limited in range. It goes up to 460 km. A CASA radar's range is only 30 km. If any one thinks that NEXRAD is "deeply flawed" due to its limited range, they need to take it up with the Flat Earth Society (the range limitation is mostly because of the earth's curvature).
Please make sure you understand an article before sending it off to Slashdot!
Re:Slow (Score:4, Informative)
The other useful thing about this kind of data collection ability is that it can also be used to improve models, especially if it has a better resolution for storm cells than the current doppler system.
Re:Slow (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Slow (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I just died a little inside... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Slow (Score:4, Informative)
The DCAS part of CASA attempts to do this using multiple radars instead. So instead of each radar doing complete volume scans, a centralized system figures out where the "interesting" regions are, and directs the radars to scan only those sectors. The eventual plan is to use phased arrays at each radar node for even higher update rates.
Re:Slow (Score:2, Informative)
Navigation Radars != Doppler Radars (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Summary wrong in pretty much every claim (Score:3, Informative)
The rotation rate of the radar is faster and the volume updates are faster as well. CASA currently operates on a one minute "heartbeat" where many scans at different elevations are completed which cover a large portion of the total reachable volume.
While CASA radar does not provide a traditional "full volume" scan this is by design. For the first time we are dealing with a weather sensor that reacts to the environment automatically adjusting it's scanning pattern to be appropriate to the weather and follow storm paths.
CASA is running on a range much shorter than Nexrad. The current testbed is actually at 40 km range. The primary flaw or gap we are filling is the lower atmosphere which, as you stated, is due to the Earth's curvature and therefore a short range is most desirable.
The CASA radars are indeed full Doppler (not just marine radar) with dual polarization as well. They are currently mechanically steered but the technology under research will adapt quite easily to electronically steered beams from phased array radar panels as well.
As a side note the Nexrad system is indeed being upgraded in place to handle dual polarization which should improve snow detection and precipitation estimation.
Also "Super-res" is being deployed. This is a software change that makes the radar appear to have greater resolution by changing the way the signal is processed into smaller "bins". Literature seems to indicate this will help the human observer of the radar, but with the increased visual noise the algorithms will not see a significant improvement.
Full disclosure: I am a graduate research assistant working on the project.
Re:Slow (Score:2, Informative)
If they can't make the radar rotate faster, they should add more dishes to the same radar so it's looking in 2 or 3 directions at once.
This is why the NWS runs the National Skywarn program to help educate everyday people like yourself on how to look for certain signs of damaging storms, including severe and tornadic storms, and report them in so that the forecasters have solid data on conditions on the ground (which the radar can't see!).
http://www.skywarn.org/