Month: May 2018

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Wind Farms, Smoke, and More

The third part of the series will focus on various forms of ground clutter and miscellaneous things like smoke and chaff. Ground clutter is generally characterized by isolated, noisy large values of reflectivity and velocity that move very little if at all. Sometimes there will be pixels of missing/no data/zero within a group of pixels with high values. The correlation coefficient is generally very low, and differential reflectivity tends to be near zero but can be variable. When watching a loop, it tends to suddenly appear and disappear in the same area, rather than moving. Some ground clutter is almost constant, but in general, it tends to be worst during the night or early in the morning. Smoke and chaff can be most readily distinguished from precipitation by the low correlation coefficient. Satellite data can also be helpful for determining if there is a fire or significant cloud cover in the area of interest.

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Birds, Bats and Bugs

In this second part of the series looking at common non-precipitation radar echoes, we will look at several examples of biological scatter, including birds, bats, and insects. Dual-polarization data is usually the best way to distinguish biological echoes from precipitation, especially in a static image. These types of echoes generally have low a correlation coefficient and high differential reflectivity. The following can help identify what kind of creatures are responsible for specific common patterns of biological echoes in radar data at certain times of the day or year.

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Managing Custom Locations in RadarScope for Windows

When bringing RadarScope to a new platform, we try to strike a balance between RadarScope’s unique personality and the way customers expect an app to behave on that platform. While features behave similarly across iOS, macOS, Android, and now Windows, the user interface often differs from one platform to the next. With that in mind, let’s take a look at how custom locations are added, managed, and displayed in RadarScope for Windows.

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Using mPING to Report Hail

Spotters and storm chasers can provide a treasure trove of information useful to NOAA National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) researchers by reporting what you see through RadarScope. Tornado sightings are extremely helpful for both warning purposes and research purposes. While it’s hard to imagine, not all the tornadoes you see get reported and make it into databases. But one of the most challenging severe storm aspects to capture is hail information.

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What Can You See on Radar Other Than Rain?

Usually, meteorologists and other weather observers use reflectivity to identify where precipitation is falling and how heavy it is. However, sometimes radars detect things that are not precipitation (the fancy term for the source of these echoes is “non-hydrometeor scatterers” or “non-meteorological scatterers”). Often, these have an unusual appearance to observers that are used to looking at precipitation, which causes people to ask “what is that?” This series of blog posts will describe several of the most common forms of non-precipitation echoes and how to use RadarScope and sometimes other meteorological data to determine the most likely explanation (usually not bats or aliens, despite the comments in the RadarScope users group on Facebook). Many of these features will only be visible on RadarScope with Expert Mode turned on, as they have relatively low reflectivity values.

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