March, 2000
Gregory Wilson, Robert Baron, and Myles Harthum Baron Services 4930 Research Drive Huntsville, Al. 35803
During the 1990's, local television broadcasts have become a critical component of the detection, dissemination and response process for significant weather events like severe storms. Advances in communication, computer, and weather remote sensing technology has allowed for the development of real-time, commercial weather systems for local television that has greatly enhanced situation awareness for dangerous storms on both the regional and mesoscale. The ability to provide protection of property and lives via television broadcasts has led most local stations to acquire some form of commercial real-time weather technology with over 100 stations currently operating their own weather radars. Short-range futurecasting the location and intensity of radar-observed severe weather using meteorologically tuned image processing technology has been shown to deliver highly accurate predictions of storm motion as well as system growth and decay. This technology has been used, in conjunction with real-time radar data processing, to develop a commercial product called FutureScan that visually projects the future location, shape and intensity of radar observed significant weather in real-time. After processing radar data for rainrate, shear, hail and other variables, FutureScan uses 1 km radar image sequences that are spectrally filtered to both translate and evolve storm imagery to produce a futurecast animation out to 1 hour at 5 minute intervals. The application of this new product to several severe weather cases observed during the last two years will be discussed including the May 3, 1999 storms in Oklahoma.
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