You are browsing the archive for Radar Archives - Dan's Wild Wild Science Journal.
27 January 2020
Should We Continue To Show Weather Radar To The Public on TV/Online?
I bet that headline got your attention, didn’t it? Before we go on, I’ll state up front that I think the answer is yes, but there is actually a decent argument to be made otherwise. When a cub TV reporter walked into the Weather Bureau office in Galveston, Texas on a muggy summer day in 1961, he saw something that few people had ever seen, a live weather radar image …
28 October 2015
NOAA Partners with Amazon To Make Real Time and Historical Radar Data Available.
In many countries (like the UK/France or Italy), this kind of data would cost you a ton of money. Here in the U.S. our weather data is very cheap. Check out the press release from NOAA today below: Partnering with Amazon Web Services on Big Data This visualization, created with NEXRAD Level II data, depicts Hurricane Katrina as it made landfall in 2005. On October 27, 2015, Amazon Web Services(link …
7 July 2013
Bats On The Radar Scope
Meteorologist Brett Collar noticed these strange circles on the radar Saturday night in San Antonio,TX. See the ghostly circles?? Is it HAARP? Is it chemtrails?? No, it’s bats. Somehow, I suspect the truth will not cut it for the tinfoil hat crowd!
17 May 2013
Thunderstorms and Cities: Is there a connection?
Guest Post from Bob Ryan Meteorologist for WJLA TV in Washington DC (This post appeared on the WJLA Weather Blog) Are cities changing summer thunderstorms? This is a follow-up blog to a story I had on our 11PM news Tuesday May 14. You can see the actual story below but I wanted to expand a few things beyond 1 minute and 30 seconds. Here’s the tease :>). Do you live in …
10 April 2013
First Radar “Hook Echo” associated with A Tornado Spotted 60 years Ago Today
Click the image to read about it on the COCORAHS blog. Oh, and get a COCRAHS gauge and sign up to help the study.
30 March 2013
How To Tell If You Are About To See Baseball Size Hail.
I’m back in Oklahoma for a few days visiting with my daughter and her dog Sebastion (AKA Bashee). We had a nice thunderstorm cluster pop up to our northwest here in Oklahoma City, and I immediately knew that someone was about to get some very large hail. Take a look at the radar image above. I have red arrows pointing toward what meteorologists call a THREE BODY SCATTER SPIKE. This …
26 January 2013
When The Donut Hole Gets Smaller, It’s About To Snow!
Around midday Friday I looked at the Doppler Radar images from Dover in Delaware, and from Wakefield Virginia and saw the images below. They are a classic case of impending snow, and something you might find interesting (and want to remember)! Here is the Dover,DE NEXRAD radar at the same time (KDOX). ..and so does the NEXRAD at Sterling in Virginia! So here is what we are really looking at: …
2 January 2013
Ring Around The Radar
In my last post I mentioned that the general public usually does not understand the weather radar images they see (on TV or online), and I saw a perfect example today. This is the Dover NEXRAD image at 2:12 PM EST today using the RadarScope app. This app is a favorite among meteorologists, but hopefully you are already wondering about something. What is causing this ring of rain around the radar?? The answer …
29 August 2012
Hurricane Isaac Strengthens Noticeably At Landfall. Risk to New Orleans Increasing.
Winds are gusting to over 100 mph just offshore now and winds are already gusting to near 80 mph around the New Orleans area tonight. The radar data shows a shrinking eye wall and that also indicates the Isaac has gotten stronger. The track now seems likely to put New Orleans in the wettest and windiest part of the storm. The storm surge and the rainfall remain the biggest worries. If you are in …
Dan Satterfield has worked as an on air meteorologist for 32 years in Oklahoma, Florida and Alabama. Forecasting weather is Dan's job, but all of Earth Science is his passion. This journal is where Dan writes about things he has too little time for on air. Dan blogs about peer-reviewed Earth science for Junior High level audiences and up.