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Phased Array Radar 1
Tue Sep 28, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
The Phased-Array Radar, on The Weather Notebook, next.
I’m Douglas Forsythe and, uh, my title is Chief of Radar Research and Development Division at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
What takes up a good bit of Forsthe’s time right now is something called “Phased Array Radar,” and it might be the next big thing. Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. To start with, here’s a little background:
It’s been used in a military application since the late ‘70’s and it’s a – they used phased array for tracking targets. And we’re converting that to look at weather targets, and the unique thing about it is that it scans electronically – it doesn’t have to have any moving parts. With the WSR88D we have to scan the atmosphere with a rotating antenna and it moves up in elevation and we gather a volume’s worth of data. Sometimes that takes us 5 to 6 minutes to gather. With the phased array we’ll do that in less than a minute.
But, he emphasizes, it could still be a while before you find a phased array radar available to your local Weather Service office, or broadcast meteorologist.
Ohhhhh, at least 5 years, maybe 10 years by the time we get the research done. It – it’s such a new technology when you can scan – one of the things we’ll do with this radar is that when we go by a tornado or phenomena like that or we see something in the atmosphere we want to look more closely at, electronically you can go back and scan that even in finer detail, and we can’t do that today with the mechanical steering antennas, so we’re going to have much more advantage and much more capability.
The Weather Notebook is supported by the National Science Foundation, and Subaru of America. We are a program of the Mount Washington Observatory, online at www.mountwashington.org.
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