Meteorology and You

Common Core State Standard: ELA: Reading Informational Text (3.1-10 through 8.1-10)
NEXRAD Radar Dome

Doppler Radar
Have you ever been to the doctor and gotten an X-Ray taken? An X-ray can give doc-
tors an image from inside the human body. Meteorologists use a similar technique to
get a picture of the inside of a storm, and we call it Doppler radar. We can peer inside
a thunderstorm to see which way the wind is moving, or how much hail there will be,
or if there’s a tornado inside of the storm. All this is very beneficial for our forecasts.

How does it work?

The National Weather Service has installed a grid of hundreds of radar sites. These
radar domes will send out a pulse which goes out hundreds of miles, and then comes
back and records what it ran into. For example, the beam can tell us if it encountered
a small rain drop or a large one. The United States military, as well as many commer-
cial airports commonly use this technology to locate their planes in the sky. Police-
man use a version of Doppler radar when they find speeding cars. The return pulse
can tell them if a car is breaking the speed limit.
Connecticut has three National Weather Service radars sweeping across our state at
all times. Think of it as a lighthouse constantly looking out for us. If there are show-
ers or thunderstorms coming from the west, we will know about them hours before
they arrive. We can tell their intensity, as well as what direction they’re moving.
This helps us tremendously during tornadoes. Lives have been saved because of our
knowledge of the storm motion. Connecticut Radar

Long Island Radar

Lightning Quick

Did You Know

Because the radar pulse bounces off of anything
that isn’t air, it will sometimes find things that
have nothing to do with precipitation. We can
spot a flock of birds taking off, or a plane fly-
ing in the sky, or sometimes the smoke from a
large forest fire. This information can sometimes
become useful to people other than meteorolo-
gists (like firefighters, air traffic control, bird
watchers).
Activity
Go to http://radar.weather.gov/ and click on a
radar site. You can see all the different radar
areas across the entire country. If it’s raining out
and you click on any of the three closest to Con-
necticut, you should be able to see the rain on
radar. You can then track it and predict where it
will go, just like what meteorologists do every
day!