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Radar Applications

Nothing informs the storm spotter of rapidly approaching weather features better than viewing live radar.  There are many ways to access weather radar, but most provide a top-down view of rain, snow, and storm cell movement in relation to population centers, highways, county/sate boundaries or land and water features.  An exception to this are radar applications that present a cross-sectional vertical view of storm cells in terms of elevation above surrounding terrain. Examples of this are found in applications like GRLevel2 Analyst by Gibson Ridge.

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Examples of the two type of views are shown bellow.

GRLevel3 v1 common top-down view

GRLevel2 Analyst v1 3 dimensional view

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Some applications show Level3 data and some show Level 2 (or both, depending on how it is used).  Applications showing representations of Level 2 data may be more expensive than the others because Level 2 data sets are much larger files and require a great deal more processing. But Level 2 data also provides more details and can provide higher resolution views and more vertical scan "slices."

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According to NOAA at this website, Level 3 radar data provides lower resolution, lower bandwidth, and has fewer products. But the upside is it is also faster.  For spotters, this faster use of imaging may save lives - especially that of the spotter who may need to get out of harm's way, or for the user needing to be aware of real-time positioning of weather threats.

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Some radar applications permit overlay of satellite photos, graphical representations of frontal boundaries, METAR data (graphical symbols representing wind speed & direction, cloud cover, dew points, and more), lightning position and aging, precipitation types, risk if severe weather, and more. Some applications require bolt-on data feed subscrptions to show these overlays and some do not.

 

In this section, we'll review a few of the available options for viewing live and archived radar data.

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Click on the section subpages at top to continue reading

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