New Radar Detects Tornadoes Faster

July 25, 2008 — -- As a record-breaking and increasingly deadly tornado season wreaked havoc across middle America this summer, researchers have been testing a new, high-tech radar system that could help forecasters better pinpoint when, where and how a twister — or any other storm for that matter — will strike.

The United States has the most powerful radar network in the world -- a national system called NEXRAD. But even so, the average tornado warning comes only 12 minutes before the storm strikes -- and three quarters of the warnings are false alarms.

"We don't want to have people who are waiting 10, 15, 20 minutes, and then nothing happens," said Kevin A. Kloesel, associate dean of the College of Atmospheric and Geographic Sciences at the University of Oklahoma.

To that end, university researchers, in conjunction with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs the National Weather Service, have been quietly testing a new high-tech system of radars that can see what current NOAA radars can't: storm activity that is close to the ground.

"The National Weather Service operates a radar network and those radars are located hundreds of miles apart. They cover huge areas, are large and do surveillance scanning over the area they cover," Kloesel said. "The problem with large scanning radar is that the farther you look out — when you send a beam straight out, the Earth is actually curving away from it as you get farther and farther away. When you get 90 to 100 miles out, that beam is sensing the storm at 8,000 to 10,000 feet."

According to Kloesel, who has worked on the project since it began six years ago, earth curvature creates an "umbrella" close to the ground that radars can't see; this new system, called Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), is designed to look under that umbrella, where severe weather, like tornadoes, and hail actually form.

In order to achieve that, CASA is built around a system of radars that are low to the ground, on cell phone towers, for example, and scan smaller areas.