National Weather Association Annual Meeting
November 9th, 2009 at 10:55 pm by Laura Velasquez under Weather
Drove to Virginia Beach to witness the developing Nor'easter...it was 47 and raining!
If you follow me on Twitter, or are friends of mine on Facebook, you may recall some of my tweets/posts several weeks ago mentioning things like dual-pol radar, precipitable water values, and hurricane forecast improvements. Well, these were just a few of the many topics discussed at the 34th Annual National Weather Association Annual meeting, held in Norfolk, Virginia, which I was able to attend.
My friends commonly refer to this as “weather geek week”, however, if you love the weather (and I do), it is perfect! Plus, in the weather world, this is one of the big events! Researchers and professors from major meteorology schools throughout the nation were in attendance, as was Greg Carbin, the Director of the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, OK, Bill Read from the National Hurricane Center in Miami, and Dr. Louis Uccellini from NCEP, to name a few. The title of this years meeting was “The Future is Now: New Technologies and Techniques to Support the Weather Enterprise and Society: 2010 and Beyond”. It sounds like a mouthful, but there was great data and ideas shared about the growth and accomplishments of technology in many aspects of the field.
Of the many topics, Dual Polarization radar is one of the hot ones. It is basically an upgrade to the radars we have now at Weather Service Offices across the country (technically known as WSR-88D or Weather Surveillance Radar – 1988 Doppler). Advances with this include; improved detection of hail in thunderstorms, rainfall rate estimations during flood or flash flooding events, better discrimination between rain and snow, and also elimination or reduction of ground clutter (buildings, birds, dust, etc.).
These improvement are possible because rather than just sending out a horizontal pulse, or beam, the radar will have the capability to send out a combination of horizontal and vertical pulses. This has been tested and studied extensively in our Nation’s Heartland and is scheduled to be expanded country-wide within the next few years. On the current plan, all radars, including the one in Grand Rapids, will have the dual-pol upgrade by the end of 2012!
It is amazing how far we have come and the advances that continue to be made. It truly was an eye-opening 4 days packed full of weather!
Very interesting! I have always been very interested in weather, even considered going into meteorology as a career at one point, so it was fun hearing about these exciting improvements and the fun stuff at “weather geek week,” lol!
That is amazing, within the last twenty years technology has advanced twenty fold. That’s super way cool:)
Laura Virgina Beach is a sweet place, too bad it was raining:( How high were the waves at the time of the Nor’Easter??
Remember, what happens at the National Weather Association Annual meeting stays at the National Weather Association Annual meeting.