Radar Anomaly

[Riley Smith]

The weather is bad, thunderstorms are flying off the Gulf of Mexico, and I've been paying attention. It's lightning and thundering a bit, and that's a bad sound in January. I wish I had a bunker in weather like this, but I guess not in this lifetime. Besides there are huge trees about, and big limbs coming down are not unheard of. So I keep a close eye on the My Radar app on the phone and stick my nose out of the door one in a while. In this connected electronic scenario, the local NWS radar sites are used for the data. They're in New Orleans and Mobile, AL respectively. The Mobile site is only about 30 mi from me and I watch the summer thunderstorms with it. But in a one of these winter Gulf blows, you want to look PAST the range of the two radars sometime, out into the deep Gulf because of the speed of the storms. And yes, there has been an arc of ....wrongness out further away from shore. You could see the error....there would be storms depicted out on the deep water and once within range of the shore radar, there were noticeably fewer, showing the unnatural arc out there. I THINK that the area is outside the range of the shore based radars, and somebody wrote some algorithm to depict the satellite shots as actual precip. Badly. After much watching. Although, some of that naval jamming hardware we're blessed with came to mind too. Anyway, thought someone might have noticed the same thing and maybe could nail it down.