TDWR as backup

[John Farley]

Today around noon, the WSR-88D in St. Louis (KLSX) was taken out by a nearby lightning strike and has been down since then. Twice since (once with the storms that took out the radar and again this evening) severe weather has moved through portions of the St. Louis area, and the TSTL Terminal Doppler radar (TDWR) has apparently worked well as a backup. During the first wave of storms, it picked up nicely on a strong surge of wind that moved through the St. Charles area and the TDWR was mentioned in an SVS. I was watching the base velocity and the wind surge showed up very well. And tonight, as a couple small supercells moved into the area, it has detected the rotation and tornado warnings were issued. Now, it is only of use fairly close to the radar site and I am sure it is being used in combination with other nearby radars, but for the immediate metro area, it is nice to have this as a backup.

 

[czenzel]

I agree. The TDWR is a good backup for the local radar sites that go out from the 88D grid. In Philadelphia the radar has gone out a few times before they placed TDWR at the PHI airport and it was a hassle to get radar information when the radar was out. The radar went out mostly during snow storms and thunderstorms. Sometimes they would post messages that the radar was down for scheduled maintance and it would take them up to a week to get parts to fix the radar (KDIX) for Philadelphia.

Since they have added the TDWR (TPHL) I have been able to get accurate and reliable radar data. I agree that TDWR is a good backup system when 88D radars go out.

 

[Mike Smith]

For a few cities like CLT, PHL, NYC, STJ and others, the TDWR is better than the WSR-88D because of its close proximity and because of its superior wind data.

 

[Lanny Dean]

I opened up Level3 and then level 2 only to see the 88d was not working. I swithced to the terminal and it was pretty neat to see those 2 tornado warnings and then the couplet on the "southern" storm. I had never really looked at or used the TDWR unless a cell was in the cone...I was pretty impressed with the wind data!
John, thanks for the update on what happend to the 88D, I was curious!

 

[David Reimer]

A few weeks ago the Fort Worth WSR-88D suffered a series of catastrophic failures and was down for nearly a week. Each of those days featured the usual pop up storms and the DFW/DAL TDWR's were very useful for the metroplex in finding downbursts. In fact they were used on 6 minute intervals which I had never seen before. In D/FW in the summer time they work just as well, if not better, then the WSR-88D because of their downdraft detection.