User:Erwin

Picture of the day

Mobile radar observation of tornadoes, or mobile Doppler weather radar, is a technique developed in the late 20th century to study rapidly evolving atmospheric phenomena such as tornadoes and severe convective storms. This is an improvement over earlier ground-based observation networks such as mesonets, which are often too slow to capture detailed measurements of short-lived events. Early innovations include the 1993 ELDORA airborne radar system, mounted on a Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft to observe large storms at high resolution, and the 1994–95 Doppler on Wheels (DOW), which was deployed during the VORTEX1 project. Later developments improved scanning speed and detail: in 2011, the RaXPol mobile radar was created to rapidly observe storms and hurricanes, and in 2023 the University of Oklahoma and the National Severe Storms Laboratory deployed HORUS, the first fully digital mobile phased array weather radar. This DOW radar loop shows the hook echo and the associated mesocyclone of the 2009 Goshen County tornado in Wyoming. The animation spans a duration of about 24 minutes, and is colored according to reflectivity data on the left and velocity data on the right.Animation credit: Joshua Wurman / Center for Severe Weather Research