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JUNE 1998 WHITON ET AL. 219 History of Operational Use of Weather Radar by U.S. Weather Services. Part I: The Pre-NEXRAD Era ROGER C. WHITON* AND PAUL L. SMITH1 Air Weather Service, Scott Air Force Base, Illinois STUART G. BIGLER National Weather Service, Washington, D.C. KENNETH E. WILK National Severe Storms Laboratory, Norman, Oklahoma ALBERT C. HARBUCK# Air Weather Service, Scott Air Force Base, Illinois (Manuscript received 14 March 1997, in ®nal form 19 February 1998) ABSTRACT The ®rst part of a history of the use of storm surveillance radars by operational military and civil weather services in the United States is presented. The history of radar meteorological research is long and distinguished but already well described. Hence, this paper and its companion focus on the history of operational radar meteorology from its birth in World War II through the introduction of the ®rst two operational Doppler weather radars. This part deals with the pre-Next-Generation Weather Radar era. An appendix to this part contains what is known by the authors about the principal technical characteristics of most of the radars discussed in both parts. 1. Introduction (1962) and Bigler (1981) summarize the history and status of the weather radar program conducted by what This and the companion paper describe the history of was then called the U.S. Weather Bureau; that material the operational use of storm surveillance radars by U.S. is updated and expanded in this paper. Research con- weather services. The papers are based on the experi- ducted by operational weather agencies is discussed ence of some of those who, at various times, have par- here, as are research threads that have found their way ticipated in or led operational weather radar programs. into operational use or have been of great bene®t to The use of radar to observe the weather developed operational radar meteorology. Here we concentrate on as an outcome of the intensive work on radar technology during World War II. The history of those early devel- the history of application of storm detection radar for opments, and of the research aspects of radar meteor- operational purposes, such as severe storm identi®ca- ology, is well described in Hitschfeld (1986), Atlas tion. Length restrictions prevented addressing the his- (1990a), and Rogers and Smith (1996). Bigler et al. tory of the operational use of cloud detection radars, wind pro®lers, and most other clear-air applications, the exception being the widely used single-Doppler clear- air wind measurement technique. Commercial applica- * Current af®liation: Science Applications International Corpora- tions of weather radar could not be covered in the space tion, O'Fallon, Illinois. available; Jorgensen and Gerdes (1951) present a good 1 Current af®liation: Institute of Atmospheric Sciences, South Da- kota School of Mines and Technology, Rapid City, South Dakota. example. # Current af®liation: Amherst Systems, Inc., Warner Robins, Geor- Initially the security classi®cation attached to radar gia. systems of all kinds limited their use to the military weather services. Later the cost and complexity of these Corresponding author address: Dr. Roger C. Whiton, SAIC, 619 systems limited their operational use to government W. Hwy 50, O'Fallon, IL 62269. agencies, principally the military and civil weather ser- E-mail: [email protected] vices; however, remote displays from weather radar sys- q 1998 American Meteorological Society Unauthenticated | Downloaded 09/27/21 01:10 AM UTC 220 WEATHER AND FORECASTING VOLUME 13 tems became affordable at airline weather of®ces, com- TABLE 1. Frequency bands in the electromagnetic spectrum (IEEE mercial weather services, and broadcast weather facil- Standard 521-1984). ities. In the 1960s, increased availability of lighter- Band weight, solid-state electronics made it practical to man- designa- Nominal frequency Nominal wavelength ufacture a storm avoidance radar for use in commercial tion range range (cm) and eventually private aircraft. Some of these systems S 2000±4000 MHz 7.5±15 were adapted for use on the ground. The capabilities of C 4000±8000 MHz 3.7±7.5 aircraft weather radars have steadily grown, and they X 8000±12 000 MHz 2.5±3.7 Ku 12±18 GHz 1.7±2.5 are now widely available. By 1969, a few television K 18±27 GHz 1.1±1.7 stations in the midwestern United States and along the Ka 27±40 GHz 0.7±1.1 southeast coast had installed radars for use in the weath- er segments of their news broadcasts; the trend broad- ened through the 1970s, as ground-based weather radars World War II delayed reporting of important ®ndings became more capable and more affordable. From the until 1945 and later. At the outbreak of the war, the late 1960s through the present time, demand continued maturity of the combatants' radio-location technology for remote radar weather information, originating from differed among themselves only by about two or three radars not under local control. The sophistication of the years. The British work was more advanced than the remote information provided in response to this demand others, largely due to the efforts of Sir Robert A. Wat- grew signi®cantly, from the simple, facsimile-based sys- son-Watt. A Scottish physicist and meteorologist, Wat- tems of the 1960s to the computer-based techniques used son-Watt was a fellow of the Royal Meteorological So- today.1 ciety by 1915, published a paper on sferics by 1922, In the late 1980s and 1990s, responding to the suc- and delivered the Symons Memorial Lecture in 1929 on cessful development of techniques for employing sin- ``Weather and Wireless.'' In the ®rst of a number of gle-Doppler weather radar observations, the Department positions he held in the British government from 1915 of Commerce, Department of Defense (DOD), and De- to 1952, Watson-Watt developed crude radio-location, partment of Transportation (DOT) jointly ®elded two direction-®nding devices that could locate thunder- highly sophisticated, ground-based Doppler weather ra- storms based on the sferics they emitted. By 1935, as dar systems, the Next-Generation Weather Radar (NEX- head of the radio department of the National Physical RAD), now called the WSR-88D, and the DOT's Ter- Laboratory, he turned to the problem of radio location minal Doppler Weather Radar. Remote single-radar and of military targets by measuring the distance between multiradar composite data service is provided by value- the transmitter and those targets. In 1935, he started added NEXRAD Imagery Dissemination System investigating the use of electromagnetic waves to locate (NIDS) vendors. Recently, the lower cost of reasonably aircraft, work that in¯uenced the design of Britain's and sophisticated ground-based weather radars, some Dopp- the world's ®rst operational radar system, the Chain ler capable, has made them affordable by a broader Home radars. That system was in place before the Battle range of commercial weather services and broadcast of Britain and is credited with being one of the most weather facilities. Some types of weather radar data are important factors enabling the outnumbered Royal Air available, although not in real time, on the World Wide Force to turn back the Luftwaffe over the skies of En- Web. gland early in the war. The letter designators used to designate electromag- Beginning in July 1940, a radar of 10-cm wavelength netic frequency ranges originated because of the need was operated at the General Electric Corporation Re- for secrecy during World War II. The band designators search Laboratory in Wembley, England, where Dr. J. were ®nally standardized by the Institute of Electrical W. Ryde worked (Doviak and Zrnic 1993). It is likely and Electronics Engineers in 1984. Those of interest to that the ®rst weather echo was seen on this radar or meteorology (some are used in this paper) are contained another like it in England, probably in late 1940 or in Table 1. possibly as late as February 1941. Perhaps to explain A table in the appendix of this paper contains what these weather echoes, which might interfere with de- is known by the authors about the principal technical tection of aircraft, Ryde was asked to investigate the characteristics of most of the radars discussed. attenuation and backscattering properties of clouds and rain (Probert-Jones 1990). Ryde reported this wartime work in the open literature later (Ryde 1946). Similar 2. Early origins studies conducted from 1942 to 1944 at the Massachu- The earliest origins of radar meteorology are dif®cult setts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Radiation Labo- to discern because the secrecy surrounding radar in ratory (the Rad Lab, as it was called), largely by Bent (1946), showed that weather could be detected on cer- tain types of radars out to ranges of 150 mi at 3- and 10-cm wavelengths. 1 Terms such as ``today'' and ``currently'' refer to 13 March 1997. During the ®rst half of 1943, Major J. Fletcher of the Unauthenticated | Downloaded 09/27/21 01:10 AM UTC JUNE 1998 WHITON ET AL. 221 Army Air Forces Weather Service worked at the Rad contacts at universities and laboratories, such as the Rad Lab and, about a year later, established a program for Lab, to help them solve the problem. In this way, prob- use of weather radar within the Army Air Forces Weath- lems could be solved expeditiously and wartime oper- er Service (Wexler and Swingle 1947). Early efforts to ational needs met quickly. Just as important, radar use radar on the ground for operational meteorological weather of®cers' education and training enabled them purposes were of two kinds (Fletcher 1990). On the one to follow and understand research in radar meteorology hand, operational use was made of radars installed for and implement promising results locally.

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