Weathered Questions 6.5

Obviously, we looked at a lot of radar in September with how wet it was around the area.

Thankfully, it's been a little bit drier as of late.

Sometimes when I look at the radar, I see a thin band of rain ahead of the main area of rain.

And the question is, why does this happen?

This is a great one.

And I'm sure a lot of people have seen this before.

And most people probably just assume, no, it's just rain.

But rarely when whatever that is gets to you, is there precipitation falling? So what that actually is, a lot of people maybe have have heard the term gust front before.

And essentially what it is, is that is the kind of.

the leading edge of the storm where the wind picks up.

And what you're seeing on the radar is actually what the wind is blowing around.

So it could be leaves.

It could be bugs.

It could be pieces of corn stock, you know, it could be a bunch of different things like that that are essentially getting blown in front of the storm as the winds are kind of diving down, hitting the ground, spreading out and pushing out in front.

And if you watch radar for a extended period of time, Generally, that little kind of thin line starts very close to a stronger storm.

And over time, it gets a little further out and kind of, you know, starts spreading out further from where the storm actually is.

Again, because what's happening is the winds are coming down, hitting the ground and kind of spreading out.

And so they're spreading out further and further and further away.

So that's what it is.

It's bugs.

It's leaves.

It's, you know, just... biological debris from from the the world around that's getting blown around that's light enough for the winds to be able to pick it up and move it around and radar how it works is it is hitting something, uh, you know, the, the pulse gets sent out from the radar beam, it hits something and it comes back.

So radar doesn't know if it's hitting a leaf or if it's hitting a raindrop or something, uh, on general reflectivity, which is what most people think of as quote unquote radar.

Um, we do have other special, uh, dual pole products that we can use to help us see those different shapes and stuff.

But, um, In general, if you're just looking at basic radar and you see something, you think it's rain, but radar itself, that pulse doesn't know what the shape of that thing is or what the makeup of that thing is.