Yet Another Reason to Dislike Spiders...

[Chris C Sanner]

From tonights OUN AFD:

A SIDE NOTE... A FEW OBSERVATION SITES...
SUCH AS LAWTON... VERNON... AND PAULS VALLEY HAVE OCCASIONALLY
INDICATED REDUCED VISIBILITIES THIS EVENING... BUT... THUS FAR WE
BELIEVE THE SENSORS MAY AGAIN BE AFFECTED BY SPIDER WEBS SINCE
TEMPERATURE/DEWPOINT SPREADS HAVE BEEN RELATIVELY LARGE.
HOWEVER... AS THE SPREADS APPROACH ZERO LATER TONIGHT... IT MAY
BECOME MORE DIFFICULT IN SOME CASES TO DISCERN BETWEEN
SITES SENSING SPIDER WEBS AND THOSE SENSING FOG.

My question is..how often does this happen and I guess the remedy is to get someone to go clean the area in question? Kind of neat really even though I personally have a very high dislike for the eight legged monsters

 

[Justin E. Reed]

It happens way to often at KNIP( NAS JAX Towers Field). This honestly occurs abour twice a month and it gets really irritating, especially if the spider sits infront of the beam and causes vis to plummet.

 

[Wesley Luginbyhl]

I saw that myself earlier this evening when I was going through the forecast dicussions. Looks like they need to go do some cleaning, though I would not want to be the one who has to go get the spiders out.

 

[John Robinson]

It's my understanding that the paint on the ASOS equipment actually has some anti-spider (arachnicide) ingredient mixed in. But, of course, after awhile the effect begins to wear off. About all that can be done is for a NWS electronics technician to drive out there and clear the spider webs. I know in our area, this is a much bigger problem in the fall than any other time of the year.

 

[Terry Tyler]

hmmm, i wonder if thats what KNQA was picking up the other night...

there was a return that i had never seen before in my 3 years of looking at radar screens...it looked similar to mountains or buildings picked up on radar, like 50< DbZ, and it remained there for about 30 mins...

do you think this was the spider webs that caused this?

 

[Joe Nield]

hmmm, i wonder if thats what KNQA was picking up the other night...

there was a return that i had never seen before in my 3 years of looking at radar screens...it looked similar to mountains or buildings picked up on radar, like 50< DbZ, and it remained there for about 30 mins...

do you think this was the spider webs that caused this?

It looks like clutter suppression was not applied properly.