NOAA Profiler Network comes back to life!

[rdale]

The NPN project was a good 20 years or so old and was cut due to budget. I'm not sure of the big picture plan, but a testbed in Norman will come online in mid-July. These profilers do two things:

NPN radars primarily report wind speed and direction at 132 heights, ranging from approximately 170 meters above ground level (AGL) up to a maximum of 16.2 kilometers. Two data types are available:

1) A 30 minute average, updated every six minutes.
2) A 60 minute average, updated once per hour.

Imagery will be available at http://www.weather.gov/npn

 

[Mark Blue]

I missed the old wind profilers. I’ll be looking forward to mid July to see what they’ve done.

 

[Warren Faidley]

Thanks so much for posting this. Too bad they are not ready for this year.

 

[K. Gentry]

I remember reading about these in my Atmos. Instrumentation class. Didn't know how widely they were used.

When the wind-profilers were on before, did models (esp thinking of HRRR) have the capability of ingesting their data? It seemingly would provide a huge improvement from only having access to robust UA data twice per day (via wx-balloons).

 

[rdale]

I'm trying to recall offhand when they ended but it was at least a decade ago - long before the HRRR existed

 

[John Wetter]

The VAD data has gotten good enough now that I wonder how well spent money would be on these after not wanting to spend the money on the last generation to bring them into treaty compliance.

 

[rdale]

I'm under the impression that it's still just for Alaska and OK is just where they test them. I may be wrong.