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Phased Array 1
Wed Sep 29, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
I’m Douglas Forsythe and my title is Chief of Radar Research and Development
Division at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.
What takes up a good bit of Forsythe’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:
Forsythe: It’s been used in a military application since the late ‘70s … 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 five to six 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.
Forsythe: Ohhhhh, (it’s) at least 5 years, maybe 10 years … by the time we get the
research done. (Phased Array Radar) is 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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