ARMOR Update

It is pretty neat stuff coming to work every day with the most advanced weather radar at any TV station in the world. Our relationship with the UAH atmospheric Sciences Department and the National Space Science Technology Center, is allowing us to do some fabulous things. Research is already underway with ARMOR. We have a working algorythm now for hydro id as well. Read on and look for a neat link at the bottom...

Before you get lost in acronyms, let me explain some of them. ARMOR stands for Advanced Radar for Operations and Research. It is a dual Polarimetric radar. One of only a handful in the country. The others are at universities and govt. Research facilities. Looking at radar echoes in a horizontal AND vertical polarization has distinct advantages. The NEXRAD radars used by the weather service are going to be upgraded to dual. pol. in a few years.

We have already gotten a feed of ARMOR out to the NWS office here in Huntsville, making it one of the few NWS forecast offices with real time dual Pole Doppler data.

I mentioned Hydro id above.

Using ARMOR we can make a determination of what kind of echo the radar is seeing. Rain, snow, hail, sleet or wet snow..etc. You will see on air in a few weeks (I hope!) a color coded image showing what the radar is seeing. That will be a first!

The best thing about all of this is what we in the WHNT weather department are learning from the researchers at UAH. Very few Meteorologists working in TV or commercial work have this opportunity.

Ok, for those of you who read this far, the UAH folks have got a great web site up with armor data. Now the radar image is on our web site already but this is much much more data at higher resolution. Do me a favor, keep it to yourself. If the server melts we will have to make it private, but I want those of you who read these blogs and are really interested to have the link!
ARMOR LIVE

Later,
Dan