NORMAN, Oklahoma (KTRK) — This summer, ABC13 Meteorologist Elyse Smith traveled to Norman, Oklahoma, to learn more about the world’s most advanced weather radar named HORUS. She joined the radar research team the morning of one of their deployment days to learn more about how this radar works.
It’s a choreographed dance to get the radar up and running, one they have perfected. As a mobile radar, HORUS can be calibrated by using a drone, another new scientific feat. Other drones fly overhead to take measurements of the atmosphere to analyze where the team should set up before storms develop.
Drones are another new piece to the field of meteorology. Dr. Petra Klein, associate dean and professor at the University of Oklahoma, tells ABC13 that some of her student’s first field projects with drones were performed in the Houston area. This was to measure the influence of the sea breeze and bay breeze on the day’s weather.
“We have learned over time that the conditions in the lowest few hundred meters of the boundary layer are really important for the formation of storms, for the information of severe weather, for how much rainfall we’re going to have,” Petra said.
And a radar like HORUS can better scan the sky to see those details. For a city like Houston, this technology can be used to warn of flash flooding down to the minute, even to the exact street. It’s something Dr. David Bodine says the existing National Weather Service radars can miss because of how slow they operate.
“Being able to see the whole storm in the precipitation aloft as it’s coming down also gives you that advanced lead time of being able to see it before it happens, too,” Bodine said.
But HORUS, a digital phased array radar, uses a tool called adaptive scanning to be able to more finely measure storms individually, something current radars also can’t do. Bodine says that it can provide faster updates for areas that really need them. The end result? Being able to warn of severe and inclement weather conditions faster and with more accuracy.
So, when will this new era of technology expand across the country? And how much will that cost? ABC13 asked experts at the National Weather Center.
Dr. Bob Palmer, the director of the National Weather Center in Norman, said that the truck-based, mobile radar costs around $7 million to $8 million to build, then around $20,000 to operate on an annual basis.
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“But for the larger system that might go across the country, the radar has to be much bigger,” he says, where a price point is unknown at this time.
Compare that to the dish-based weather radars used today. Those need constant physical maintenance, where finding parts can be tougher since it’s older technology. And if one part of the dish-based radar stops working, the whole thing goes down. Phased array radars, like Horus, can still collect data even when other elements fail. That’s because they’re digital, software-based radars. As Dr. Dusan Zrnic says, “There’s not as many fail points.”
If phased array radars become the next generation of weather radars for the NWS, Danae Carlis with the National Severe Storms Laboratory tells ABC13, “We’re going to be making some decisions here in the next five to 10 years about what the future weather radar network will look like. We need to make that next leap and that next jump in order to really protect lives and property and support the communities out there.”
Researchers with HORUS agree, noting they learn something new every time they deploy HORUS in the field.
“The work we’re doing is definitely pushing the weather service to go that direction. That is exactly what I envision in the future is to be able to see basically a real-time scan of a storm,” Redmond Kelly, lead radar engineer, said.
And time will tell if a radar like HORUS could one day replace all the weather service radars, which could happen within the next 10 to 15 years.
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