Mobile radars, in a meteorological context, are Doppler weather radars affixed to vehicles (or aircraft) for academic or military research. In the mid-1990s, mobile weather radars were designed and created with the goal to study atmospheric phenomena.
History
Transportable weather radars have been used on dozens of scientific and academic research projects from their invention in the 1950s. A problem facing meteorological researchers was mesonets (themselves developed to fill in gaps between widely spaced weather stations) and other ground-based observation methods were often deployed deployed too slowly to accurately and sufficiently completely record significant atmospheric phenomena. In 1993, the Electra Doppler Radar (ELDORA) system was created, consisting of a dual-beam radar mounted on top of a Lockheed P-3 Orion aircraft. The system was designed to provide high-resolution measurements of characteristics of very large storms when ground-based radar cannot. Between 1994-1995, the initial Doppler on Wheels (DOW) was constructed and was deployed for the first time at the end of the VORTEX1 Project. The DOW was developed by Joshua Wurman and collaborators to obtain recordings within tornadoes and their vicinity to augment the mobile mesonets which had been developed to place observations directly where needed around storms instead of relying on storms to pass over fixed mesonet or other observation sites. The Doppler on Wheels led to several scientific breakthroughs and theories regarding tornadoes and tornadogenesis, such as how tornadoes work within their life cycles and how tornadoes form. The DOWs led to the “first tornado wind maps, measurements of an axial downdraft and lofted debris, multiple vortices, winds versus damage and surface measurement intercomparisons, winds as low as 3–4 m (9.8–13.1 ft) above ground level (AGL) and low-level inflow, 3D ground-based velocity track display (GBVTD) vector wind field retrievals, rapid evolution of debris over varying land use and terrain, documentation of cyclonic/anticyclonic tornado pairs, and documentation of varied and complex tornado wind field structures including multiple wind field maxima and multiple vortex mesocyclones, downward propagation of vorticity and an extensive climatology of tornado intensity and size revealing, quantitatively, that tornadoes are often much more intense and larger than indicated by damage surveys.” In 2011, Howard Bluestein, a research professor at the University of Oklahoma (OU), led a team to develop the Rapid X-band Polarimetric Radar (RaXPol). In 2013, researchers published at the American Meteorological Society (AMS) that RaXPol was created because “the need for rapidly scanning weather radars for observing fast-changing weather phenomena such as convective storms, microbursts, small-scale features in hurricanes, and the process of convective development has been well established” throughout history. This included publications by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in 1983, research by several scientists published in 2001, and published research by the U.S. federal government in 2012. The United States Department of Defense gave the University of Oklahoma over $5 million (2019 USD) in the development of new mobile radars, which were set to be used by the United States Navy. In 2023, the University of Oklahoma, along with the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) developed and deployed the first ever fully digital mobile phased array radar, Horus.
List of notable observations
Several tornadoes throughout the last few decades have been observed by various mobile radars. However, only the most notable ones are used for academic research and subsequently published. This is a list of known tornadoes which were observed by mobile radars.
1990–1999
2000–2009
2010–2019
2023
2024
See also Convective storm detection
References
