New Tornado Radar Deployed

[Scott_inVA]

"New Tornado Radar System Installed in Oklahoma"
(Source: Associated Press, 5/3/05)

An experimental radar system aimed at giving meteorologists a clearer
picture of a forming tornado is being installed in Chickasha, Rush
Springs, Lawton and Cyril, according to a University of Oklahoma
meteorology professor.

Dr. Kelvin Droegemeier says the system is expected to go online by
next spring.

The radar system is being developed jointly by the University of
Oklahoma and three other universities. It is called the Collaborative
Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere program, said Droegemeier, who
also is director of the Center for Analysis and Prediction of Storms.

The radars in the four communities will form a diamond-shaped test
bed.

Droegemeier said the system is designed to fill in the current blind
spot in NEXRAD radar which is caused by the curvature of the earth.

Because of that, NEXRAD can only see above three kilometers to the
top of a storm.

By using a network of low-powered radars in close proximity, the CASA
program radar is expected to be able to bring the scanning range down
to within 50 meters of the ground. The radar also will be able to
target specific weather features, including tornadoes that are
shrouded in heavy rain.

Droegemeier said that once developed, the low-powered radars could be
installed on cell phone towers across the country to provide a large
overlapping network of weather radar.

He said the test area was picked because it sees an average of 50
severe storms per year with an average of two tornado touch downs a
year. The storms also create about four false alarms per year.

Droegemeier said 75 percent of the current tornado warnings are false
alarms because of how NEXRAD reads a storm.

The system should be able to identify a tornado within 60 seconds of
formation and provide meteorologists with street-level tracking of
weather events.

The system is part of a $40 million research project, announced last
year, that is aimed at increasing the warning time for not only
tornadoes but also flash floods and other severe weather disturbances.

The main office of the research center is at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst. However, OU is a primary research partner in
the center's weather and early warning projects.

[rockst0ne]

Do you know if the data from this research will be available in real time next spring?