Wow, can you say cover story?
National Weather Service runs a story on RADAR showing “bugs” and “lakes” in North Texas the day after a large RADAR pulse at the Texas New Mexico border region.
Love it.
Large microwave RADAR pulse out of Cannon Air Force base in Central / Eastern New Mexico.
Watch for possible severe weather to hit the center of the pulse (or very close to the center) within 2-3 days.
Tornadoes, hail, and damaging winds are possible at the center of the pulse within 48 hours or so.
Large microwave RADAR pulse out of Cannon Air Force base in Central / Eastern New Mexico.Watch for possible severe…
Posted by Dutchsinse on Thursday, July 30, 2015
Here is the cover story…
Let’s face it: The men and women of the National Weather Service tend to get pretty bored ’round this time of the year. There are only so many ways you can say, “Hot and dry.” So this it what passes for weather news in the dead of a dead-calm, brutally hot afternoon:
You can actually see area lakes on the radar, along with the grasshoppers flying a few hundred feet over North Texas.
“I came in and saw the radar and thought it was neat and thought other people might enjoy it too,” says Ted Ryan, the meteorologist in the NWS’s Fort Worth office who posted this brief explainer about the radar. He’s got a point: Last week this CNN item about bugs showing up in the North Texas radar became a virtual sensation for an afternoon.
“This is the same thing as that,” says Ryan. “This time of year, when we see green on the radar it’s usually grasshoppers – unless it’s rain, and we know it’s not rain. The difference is today what we’re seeing is that there’s no wind, so when the grasshoppers hit those rising ground thermals they rise straight up, and since there are no grasshoppers over the lakes, the radar shows a reflection of the land of the land as well as part of the ground clutter.”
Green means the satellite’s getting a lot of signal bounce-back; blue, not as much. That’s how Ryan can tell these are grasshoppers: “They reflect a lot of that signal back” because of their size, he says. “On really hot days we’ll see the grasshopper signal as green.” What’s strange, he says, is that you can see the lakes. That almost never happens.
“That’s what made today interesting,” he says. “Again, it’s a hot day with calm winds, and it’s pretty rare for us to have calm winds during the afternoon hours. Any winds and we’d see the grasshoppers get in the air and over the lakes, and everything would be the same shade of green. But we have green where the land is and blue where the lakes are.”
Science!
Oh – and it might rain tomorrow. And it might be in the upper 90s.
http://www.dallasnews.com/news/20150730-this-is-why-grasshoppers-and-lakes-are-showing-up-on-north-texas-weather-radar-today.ece
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