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Weather Radar - Do you understand it? (1 Viewer)

TheIronSheik

TheIronSheik

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So I was reading an article by a met who said that most people don't have an understanding of how radar works other than the basics.  And what he meant by basics was that if it was green (or some color) over your location, you knew it was raining/snowing.  I thought he was off on his thoughts.  So I asked my wife and she was lost.  But my wife isn't really tech savvy, so not a good judge there.  I asked my friends and for the most part, they didn't know much about radar.  I was kind of shocked.  I realize I'm a weather nerd, and for the most part I know I have a better knowledge than most others who are not.  But when it came to radar, I just assumed people knew because it's the one thing they're constantly showing on even the local news weather reports.

The question was this:  If you were heading out for an afternoon, can you look at a radar and figure out if rain is on its way or not?  And while out that afternoon, could you look at a radar and determine if severe weather was very close to your location?

Obviously all FBG's are geniuses, so I'm sure everyone in here knows everything.  So if you have to give your friend's answer instead of yours, that's perfectly acceptable.

 
hagmania said:
Besides "look to the west and guesstimate" I don't really have any radar savvy.
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I should really preface this comment with "I don't check the weather until 30 seconds before I head out the door. I'm only weather-aware enough to duck and cover if I hear sirens."

Also, me checking the weather consists of, "Alexa..."

 
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If Im heading out for the day and trying to decide if I need a rain jacket, I look at the hour-by-hour forecast on the weather.com app. If everything is under 50% I usually assume it wont rain much that day.

If Im out on the boat and deciding whether to keep fishing or head in, I look at the radar on the weather.com app and move it ahead an hour to see what's (projected to be) coming.

I assume this puts me in the "knows the basics" category, but interested to hear if there's a better/easier way.  :popcorn:

 
TheIronSheik said:
So I was reading an article by a met who said that most people don't have an understanding of how radar works other than the basics.  And what he meant by basics was that if it was green (or some color) over your location, you knew it was raining/snowing.  I thought he was off on his thoughts.  So I asked my wife and she was lost.  But my wife isn't really tech savvy, so not a good judge there.  I asked my friends and for the most part, they didn't know much about radar.  I was kind of shocked.  I realize I'm a weather nerd, and for the most part I know I have a better knowledge than most others who are not.  But when it came to radar, I just assumed people knew because it's the one thing they're constantly showing on even the local news weather reports.

The question was this:  If you were heading out for an afternoon, can you look at a radar and figure out if rain is on its way or not?  And while out that afternoon, could you look at a radar and determine if severe weather was very close to your location?

Obviously all FBG's are geniuses, so I'm sure everyone in here knows everything.  So if you have to give your friend's answer instead of yours, that's perfectly acceptable.
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I like the question.

I don't have a definitive answer, but if I had to guess, I would say that it could give pretty accurate guesses in most cases, with a certain degree of error. Things can change over time to break up or create new storms, but it seems to me that most storms are similar enough that the predictions via radar are pretty accurate.

Well, it is really accurate in the present. So, yeah - I could look at radar an know what is happening now & where, but it is the future planning part that makes this interesting.

 
TheIronSheik said:
So I was reading an article by a met
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Oh, weather nerd slang.  I guess those baseball players might know something having to play outside on a regular basis and all.

I usually use the motion feature of the radar app on my phone/computer to see how fast and in what direction some fronts might be moving or if it looks like they are breaking up.  :shrug:  

 
TheIronSheik said:
The question was this:  If you were heading out for an afternoon, can you look at a radar and figure out if rain is on its way or not?
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Given a time-lapsed radar image of the last 60-90 minutes or so, of course. Around here, the occasional pop-up thunderstorm can still confound outdoor plans independent of a well-defined moving front ... but generally time-lapsed radar helps predict immediate-term weather events pretty well.
 

And while out that afternoon, could you look at a radar and determine if severe weather was very close to your location?
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A radar snapshot is fine for this. Yes, I can look at a spot of 'bad weather' on a map and determine if it is close to my location or not. :shrug:   Skillwise, isn't this just general map-reading? No different than checking a map to see if you are close to a landmark, or an address, or any fixed position?

 
I have a 4kw radar unit on my boat, it is black and white though.

I can identify large storms, but have trouble with identifying their direction or speed.

 
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MTskibum said:
I can identify large storms, but have trouble with identifying their direction or speed.
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Does your boat's radar only show point-in-time snapshots, or can you at least get a quick time-lapse 'video' of the last hour or so?

 
Doug B said:
Does your boat's radar only show point-in-time snapshots, or can you at least get a quick time-lapse 'video' of the last hour or so?
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There is no time lapse video. 

I have an older multi-function device(off), raymarine C90W.

I am unsure if the new units have time lapse radar. Many people are switching to satellite weather for storm tracking offshore. Modern boat radar is more for auto-pilot or navigating in the fog.

I do not have either auto-pilot or satellite weather in my dinghy though. I need to become better at reading radar.

 
belljr said:
sheik... can your wife read a map?
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She can.

So the future radar is a great tool, but very inaccurate since it's just trying to predict the future.  It's great for knowing that the rain might move into the eastern part of the state, but not so much for where the heavy stuff will be or where the drizzle will be.

For the most part, it sounds like everyone is good with the basics.  Which is what I thought.  The basic premise of "look out west" is a good general rule of thumb.  Again, not incredibly accurate, but it gets the job done.

So if anyone of you has an outdoor activity planned for a couple of hours in the afternoon and a Severe Thunderstorm Watch is issued for your area, would you be able to look at the radar and know when it's time to start moving to a safer location?  Or do you not even look at the radar, as some of you mentioned?

 
hagmania said:
No shtick, if it's not a tornado warning, I haven't watched a local news weather report in 14 years.
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With smartphones, I can believe it.  One of the things the article was talking about was how much more technology we have and how much easier it is to get it to people.  But there might be a problem with the expectations of people understanding it all, or even caring to understand it all.  

 
Had a Geography Prof tell the class this back in the late 80s:

“When the weatherman says there’s a 30% chance of rain, he means that it will rain for sure, just in 30% of the area.”

I was too stupid to ask what defined “the area” but this rule of thumb has helped me ever since. Well that, and Windy.com. 

 
MTskibum said:
There is no time lapse video. 

I have an older multi-function device(off), raymarine C90W.

I am unsure if the new units have time lapse radar. Many people are switching to satellite weather for storm tracking offshore. Modern boat radar is more for auto-pilot or navigating in the fog.

I do not have either auto-pilot or satellite weather in my dinghy though. I need to become better at reading radar.
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And for finding birds.

 
RADAR seems pretty simple to interpret, but I can understand inexperienced people not following the detail.

 
My whole life revolves around weather:

1. Job

2. Kids sports

3. Running

I can read it, interpret it, and predict it based on the radar and the wind patterns. Weather Underground's Wundermap has saved me plenty over the years. 

 
Quint said:
Had a Geography Prof tell the class this back in the late 80s:

“When the weatherman says there’s a 30% chance of rain, he means that it will rain for sure, just in 30% of the area.”

I was too stupid to ask what defined “the area” but this rule of thumb has helped me ever since. Well that, and Windy.com. 
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I remember hearing this as a kid, too.  I've asked around and so have a lot of others, but I have yet to hear anything definitive on whether it's true or an old wive's tale.  Either way, like you said, it's a great rule of thumb.

 
I spend a fair amount of early morning hours outside doing athletic things so knowing the weather is pretty important to my schedule. That said, by your standards, my family would be weather geeks since all can look at a radar screen and know what is occurring. Growing up in OH you also pay attention to the weather as you can four seasons in one day on occasion so it's always been part of my routine.

 
I'll tell you who I have a feeling can not interpret radar. My chick. She asked me why I hadn't bought her anything from the Gucci outlet store since I'm up north running errands all the time.

The Gucci outlet is 50 miles south of where we live, and she's driven herself there multiple times.
 
ChiefD said:
My whole life revolves around weather:

1. Job

2. Kids sports

3. Running

I can read it, interpret it, and predict it based on the radar and the wind patterns. Weather Underground's Wundermap has saved me plenty over the years. 
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I suspect there is a strong correlation between runner's and the ability to read and interpret forecasted weather. 

 
TheIronSheik said:
When you say detail, what are you referring to?  I ask because I don't want to assume anything.
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Well a simple RADAR map shows you a nice color coded key to follow.  I would think most people could pick up the meaning of the colors red = bad, green = not too bad type thing.    I doubt most people understand that the colors are coded to the dBZ scale, although some RADAR maps will include that numerical information.   If they follow the key, they could probably then figure out which numbers are "bad".  However, I suspect most people have no clue as to what those numbers mean.

ETA...I was referring to simple reflectivity maps above.  Radial velocity maps introduce a whole other level of nuance in interpreting wind speed and relative motion.  The local forecasters use these a lot in their severe storm coverage for pointing out areas of rotation and highlighting tornado warnings.  

 
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Galileo said:
Well a simple RADAR map shows you a nice color coded key to follow.  I would think most people could pick up the meaning of the colors red = bad, green = not too bad type thing.    I doubt most people understand that the colors are coded to the dBZ scale, although some RADAR maps will include that numerical information.   If they follow the key, they could probably then figure out which numbers are "bad".  However, I suspect most people have no clue as to what those numbers mean.

ETA...I was referring to simple reflectivity maps above.  Radial velocity maps introduce a whole other level of nuance in interpreting wind speed and relative motion.  The local forecasters use these a lot in their severe storm coverage for pointing out areas of rotation and highlighting tornado warnings.  
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Yeah, that's the thing.  He mentioned that people didn't understand the colors, as in the strength of the storm.  Everyone I talked with was able to deduce that the brighter colors "seemed" to mean something worse.  I found that the most odd, really.  But this was his point, in that we sometimes assume that everyone knows the basics.  

 
TheIronSheik said:
If you were heading out for an afternoon, can you look at a radar and figure out if rain is on its way or not?  And while out that afternoon, could you look at a radar and determine if severe weather was very close to your location?
Click to expand...
Not gonna front. I use the radar as a last line of weather check as the hour is upon us. I have Weather.com, Dark Sky and just installed NOAA weather radar app recently. :nerd:  

 
Galileo said:
Well a simple RADAR map shows you a nice color coded key to follow.  I would think most people could pick up the meaning of the colors red = bad, green = not too bad type thing.    I doubt most people understand that the colors are coded to the dBZ scale, although some RADAR maps will include that numerical information.   If they follow the key, they could probably then figure out which numbers are "bad".  However, I suspect most people have no clue as to what those numbers mean.
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Cool. Thnx. I've never even noticed the numerical information before. I am assuming the numbers are either raw data or a computation result that is then used to create the visual map. Close?

Galileo said:
ETA...I was referring to simple reflectivity maps above.  Radial velocity maps introduce a whole other level of nuance in interpreting wind speed and relative motion.  The local forecasters use these a lot in their severe storm coverage for pointing out areas of rotation and highlighting tornado warnings. 
Click to expand...
The part about weather that has always most interested me is the models used for prediction.

When I was younger, I read about a cool model:

In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.[1]

The term, closely associated with the work of Edward Lorenz, is derived from the metaphorical example of the details of a tornado (the exact time of formation, the exact path taken) being influenced by minor perturbations such as the flapping of the wings of a distant butterfly several weeks earlier. Lorenz discovered the effect when he observed that runs of his weather model with initial condition data that was rounded in a seemingly inconsequential manner would fail to reproduce the results of runs with the unrounded initial condition data. A very small change in initial conditions had created a significantly different outcome.[2]
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Do you know if anything has ever come from this?

I am not sure how needed such understanding is - but the idea is really beautiful in a certain way.

 
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TheIronSheik said:
She can.

So the future radar is a great tool, but very inaccurate since it's just trying to predict the future.  It's great for knowing that the rain might move into the eastern part of the state, but not so much for where the heavy stuff will be or where the drizzle will be.

For the most part, it sounds like everyone is good with the basics.  Which is what I thought.  The basic premise of "look out west" is a good general rule of thumb.  Again, not incredibly accurate, but it gets the job done.

So if anyone of you has an outdoor activity planned for a couple of hours in the afternoon and a Severe Thunderstorm Watch is issued for your area, would you be able to look at the radar and know when it's time to start moving to a safer location?  Or do you not even look at the radar, as some of you mentioned?
Click to expand...
There’s an app for that. Hi Def Radar. Pretty easy. You find yourself on the map. You look at any green or purple or red etc nearby. You watch the time lapse of how it’s moved over the last couple hours. Based on speed and direction, guesstimate whether and when it will hit you. Not rocket science. 

 
Are you asking if we know how exactly radar works or if we know "red is severe weather, orange is a little less bad, and green is mostly just rain"?

 
I mean yeah.  The apps on your phone basically handle it all.  Except somehow I feel like I am less informed now than like in the 80s about severe warnings.  

 
Man of Constant Sorrow said:
Cool. Thnx. I've never even noticed the numerical information before. I am assuming the numbers are either raw data or a computation result that is then used to create the visual map. Close?

RADAR imaging is used to measure the reflectivity which is basically the amount of radiant energy reflected from a sample of material, say rain water.  This value depends on the number of drops per volume in the sample and the size of the drops.  The reflectivity values are then compared to a standard, thus establishing relative scale.  The standard for comparison is the reflected energy from a 1 mm drop of water in a 1 m^3 volume of space.  This value is symbolized with the letter "Z".  The "dBZ" I referenced means decibel relative to Z.  There is an incredibly large range of possible values and so for convenience, a logarithmic scale is used (similar to how intensity of sound is measured).  Then, as you correctly surmised, the various values throughout the range are coded by color to produce a visual representation.  These values can then be related through a simple equation to the rate at which precipitation is falling.  Any of this making sense?  I feel I am rambling a bit.  

The part about weather that has always most interested me is the models used for prediction.

When I was younger, I read about a cool model:

Do you know if anything has ever come from this?

With regard to chaos theory, I am somewhat aware of basics, but am by no means very well versed in it.  But, yes, chaos theory is used to describe the behavior of any system where small changes in initial conditions generate unpredictable differences in outcomes.  A good example in the world of physics is the double pendulum.  Have some fun with this simulation... https://www.myphysicslab.com/pendulum/double-pendulum-en.html  (check out the multi graph view mode for a better visual of the patterns that emerge)

I am not sure how needed such understanding is - but the idea is really beautiful in a certain way.  AGREED!
Click to expand...

 
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culdeus said:
I mean yeah.  The apps on your phone basically handle it all.  Except somehow I feel like I am less informed now than like in the 80s about severe warnings.  
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The phone apps are okay for general info over the next few hours, but no more than that and they're even limited in that regard. Depending on where you are anyway. 

If you have good local weather people on Twitter follow them for the severe stuff. 

 
It was easier when I lived in the Midwest where weather moved from West to East for the most part. In Arizona alot of our weather comes from the southeast. Just weird to get used to.

 
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I have never “checked the weather,” especially not using anything like radar. I live in San Diego.

I do, however, remember when radar was styled RADAR.

 
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