StormTrack 3 Meteorologist looks inside local Doppler Radar

SHALLOTTE, NC (WWAY) — Southeastern North Carolina has a very complex environment which means we see a huge variety of weather throughout the year.

One of the most important tools forecaster use daily is the Doppler radar. StormTrack 3 Meteorologist Helen Holt took a tour Thursday inside of our area’s radar.

Standing high above the treeline is the Weather Surveillance Radar System or the Doppler radar.

Within this big dome is a dish stretching 30 feet wide that rotates around collecting critical weather data.

National Weather Service Meteorologist Mark Bacon says, “Radar is by far the most valuable tool to assessing severe weather because your next more accurate form of remote sensing is things like satellites and they are tens of thousands of miles up in space.”

The radar sends out waves of energy, bounces off things like hail and rain within a thunderstorm and that information is reflected back to the dish, then analyzed by National Weather Service and the StormTrack3 weather team.

“It uses the Doppler effect to see motion towards or away from the radar and that’s what a circulation would look like and that’s usually the main indicator to a warning meteorologist like myself that that thunderstorm being sampled may be capable of producing severe weather including damaging winds, large hail, or a tornado,” Bacon said.

National Weather Service Warning Coordination Meteorologist Steve Pfaff says “the radar detects things like rain, hail, snow and from that they have logarithms that can be run to determine the size of the rain drops and get better rainfall estimates or the size of the hail which would help with a severe thunderstorm warning.”

Pfaff adds “the radar also determines velocity so we can analyze the wind within the thunderstorms and if we see a rotation start to develop within the storm and we see it develop down through the storm that would prompt us to issue a tornado warning.”

“It’s always looking up a little bit and then it goes around a couple of times and then it looks up every higher because we are trying to get a whole vertical picture of the thunderstorm which could be up to 40,000 feet tall,” Bacon said.

The radar is located in Brunswick county for a reason centered within our area’s most populated locations.

“It is skewed closer to the coast because of the hurricane threat,” said  says. “As these storms approach from the southeast and come in from the Atlantic Ocean, we can determine the wind structure within the hurricane and from that we may have to tweak the category of the hurricane based on the data that it is observing so there’s multiple pieces of the puzzle that we use to issue warnings but this is the most important elements of that.

Flash floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, severe weather all are possible in southeastern North Carolina, but it’s vital you know what to do if it happens.

“If a warning is issued based on a data from this radar people need to action to stay safe,” Pfaff said. “You can have the best warnings in the world, but if people don’t prepare the way they are suppose to and take the action when they need to then that could lead to tragedies.”

This week is Severe Weather Preparedness Week so make sure you review safety tips with your family and prepare for the upcoming severe weather and hurricane season.