7 day forecasts and current conditions - just press and hold for a second on the radar map Snow/mixed precipitation display (only on 1km base reflectivity radar layer) 3 and 6 day precipitation and pressure forecasts from NOAA weather models Most Nexrad dual polarization products, including differential reflectivity, correlation coefficient, specific differential phase, and hydrometeor classification at 4 scan levels Most Nexrad station products, including reflectivity, composite reflectivity, base and storm velocity (all at 4 scan angles), vertically integrated liquid, echo tops, one hour and storm total precipitation. Standard resolution (1 km) radar composites Super resolution (0.25 km) radar composites If you're a detail person, feel free to read our complete list of features: Believe it or not, we offer access to about 40 different radar products.īut we didn't stop there! We also provide access to severe weather warnings, storm tracks, hurricane tracks, hourly precipitation forecasts, 7 day point forecasts, current temperature overlays, jet stream maps, and 3 and 6 day precipitation forecast precipitation and pressure maps and more. This lets you either view the big picture of what's going on with the weather, or view radar products that can't be combined into a mosaic, such as multi-scan level reflectivity, velocity, and dual polarization radar. The radar tilts up so it’s never aimed towards the ground or us, but instead through the varying parts of thunderstorms.Dual Radar US is the only app in the app store that provides beautiful super hi-resolution (250 meter) radar mosaics for the continental United States AND images directly generated from raw Nexrad Level 3 station data.
It’s a giant piece of machinery, and if a human were to stand in the way of the emitting waves, which is strongly discouraged, the human would feel themselves start to heat up like a microwave. As fast as it physically can,” explains Tony Freund, Electronic Technician for the National Weather Service in New Braunfels. During very violent weather, like tornadoes possibly, it’s really spinning fast, and it’s making cuts in the air very quickly. “During calm air, during calm ’s going much slower. Once inside the iconic “soccer ball” in the sky, we saw the giant dish that spins 360 degrees all day long. KSAT climbed almost 90 feet to get inside the “radome” for a better look at what makes these radar images possible. One near Brackettville and one in New Braunfels. Here in San Antonio, we utilize two Doppler radar stations. The reason? They could see the debris field on the Doppler radar image. The NWS issued a tornado warning that day with the wording “tornado on the ground” without any eyewitness evidence. KSAT Meteorologist Adam Caskey shows the radar image during what is later determined to be an EF-2 tornado in Guadalupe County on March 21st, 2022. Improvements are constantly being made to radar technology. Today, there are 159 weather radars strategically placed throughout the U.S. So, after wartime, some of the radars were donated to the Weather Bureau. It was detecting weather where radar proved to be most useful. “Radar was a boon for air traffic controllers, it was also later developed for radio astronomy, and traffic cops now use it to check for speeders,” adds Purifacto.
Radars then really took off, and experiments all over the world began. Of course, it was the Japanese invasion fleet of Pearl Harbor,” said Purifacto. “They spotted a flight of planes, they believed was a flight of planes, 136 nautical miles north of Oahu. On December 7, 1941, the first major example of what radar could do took place. The radars eventually started being used to detect aircraft. “In 1934, they conducted experiments on behalf of the United States Navy because the Navy was concerned again about maritime navigation,” said Rudy Purifacto, Senior Air Force Historian. The Army Signal Corps coined the acronym RADAR, which stands for “radio detection and ranging.” In the early 1900′s, military ships and planes needed radar to avoid collisions in the fog, but the technology became a means of defense for the first time in World War II. In this episode of KSAT Explains, KSAT meteorologist Justin Horne visits the National Weather Service station in New Braunfels for answers, as well as the Bracken Bat cave, a common hotspot on radar images. Meteorologists and weather experts in South Texas rely heavily on Doppler radar technology, but how does it work? How can a giant soccer-ball-shaped tower, known as the radome, detect clouds hundreds of miles away and send them to a computer as rain?