COLUMBIA, S.C. — Through this Friday work is being done to extend the lifespan of Columbia’s radar. While we don’t have any rain in the forecast this week, this tool is vital for communicating and forecasting the weather.
Inside the large white dome is the radar itself. The radar has a pretty lengthy name. The Weather Surveillance Radar, 1988, Doppler, which indicates the type of radar and the year it began to be used by the weather service but for short we can call it the WSR 88-D. The dish on this radar is a massive 28 feet in diameter and uses a total of 750,00 watts.
There are 155 of these radars around the US that create the most comprehensive radar network on the planet that is used by NWS forecasters like Chris Landolfi on a daily basis.
“Even when there is no rain there are different things we can glean from the radar but obviously in severe weather operations we can diagnose whether a storm could turn severe or whether we could see a tornado to touch down.”
The radar does this by sending out short but powerful pulses of microwave radiation that travel around 40 miles. The dish itself can spin as fast as 1 full revolution every 10 seconds to get a new scan. When these waves are sent out, they bounce off of things like thunderstorms, and depending on the return wave we can determine many things like precipitation types, rates, and wind speeds.
This is being constantly done by the radar for decades straight at a time.
“For reference, our radar was installed in 1994, and since 1994 outside of some preventative maintenance here and there it has been running 24/7 during calm days, during severe weather days.”
After being offline for around 2 weeks, the weather service says that Columbia’s radar should be up and running by the end of this week. Charleston’s radar is expected to go under similar upgrades in the near future.