Big ideas advance weather enterprise

Ø Severe Storms Lab Director Jeff Kimpel forecasts future of state’s weather ventures

By Randall Turk

Transcript Business Editor

It took big ideas to advance a “third rate” weather enterprise to be at the forefront in predicting severe storms.

More big ideas are on the way, said Jeff Kimpel, director of the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman.

During a lecture on January 6, 2005, Kimpel described some of the milestones leading to the creation of the National Weather Center and what lies ahead for the collaborative venture.

The lecture was part of the Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program sponsored by the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education.

In 1960 the OU School of Meteorology began small in an old Navy barracks building at Westheimer Airport, Kimpel said. Soon, a growing cluster of government and OU weather groups will relocate to the new $87 million National Weather Center on the south research campus. Big ideas have been responsible for it all, Kimpel said.

The national Doppler weather radar system began at the severe storms lab in 1968. The Doppler radar, which can see advancing and retreating weather systems, was built from a surplus radar that had operated on the “Dew Line,” a military surveillance system employed during the Cold War era, Kimpel said. “We got one and modified it. We can see a tornado signature in a Doppler.”

Today, 140 “NEXRAD” weather radar throughout the country provide data that result in severe storm warnings 12 to 13 minutes in advance of severe storms, Kimpel said. Unisys, the electronic manufacturer, got $2 billion for manufacturing the NEXRAD units, and the government got the technology, he said.

OU’s Center for the Analysis and Prediction of Storms (CAPS) began with an idea, Kimpel said. “CAPS started when a young lady working on a Ph.D. said she thought mathematically we could use radar to retrieve the wind field and thus the temperature and pressure fields in storms. We could use radar as an observation source to predict weather.”

Another idea resulted in the Oklahoma Mesonet, a system of electronically connected weather data stations throughout the state. “Three government guys had an epiphany,” he said. It resulted in OU and OSU partnership and an initial $2.7 million from fines oil companies had paid for overcharging for their product.

The Oklahoma Mesonet, a model for other states, won awards from Harvard University and Stockholm for innovation in government enterprise.

Another idea, analyzing the climate from clouds, has been going on at OU since 1990. “Clouds are the No. 1 scientific challenge to climate modeling,” Kimpel said. “We lured Pete Lamb from the University of Illinois. He has $15 million worth of equipment for his atmospheric radiation measurement program.”

Presently, the Oklahoma weather enterprise operates on about $60 million, half of that from the government, Kimpel said. It is being joined by private companies like Weather Decision Technologies, Weathernews and Vieux & Associates. The private companies adapt weather research to produce their own weather products such as short-term, high resolution weather forecasts for other companies and even other countries.

Work is progressing on other big ideas that could produce great change in weather technology, Kimpel said. Dual polarization radar can “map out what’s in the clouds.” And phased array radar now being tested can perform many functions at once and improve detection at lower cost.

Kimpel described a phased array radar as “4,200 baby radars, each sending beams that can be sprayed out in microsecond intervals. It’s a radar with no moving parts, very fast, that collects a lot of data. There’s hope we can make much more rapid forecasts with phased array radar.”

By 2020, the cost to replace and maintain 506 radar managed by the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) will reach $350 billion, Kimpel said. “What if we could merge them into one system? The problem with big radar is that the earth curves away from the radar beam. The solution? Cheap, baby phased array radars on every cell phone tower in the country. We’d have the surface of the earth covered.”

The phased array radar would be less costly and handle multiple functions such as scanning for weather, tracking aircraft and homeland security functions, he said. “It could save the country billions of dollars.”

Kimpel said new technology will bring the cost of radar down from the present $7.5 million for one NEXRAD radar unit. He said the country’s 506 NEXRAD radars could be replaced with 300 phased array radar at $10 million apiece. With no moving parts, the more effective radar would cost far less to maintain, he said. “Over the life cycle (of the new radar) there would be a savings in maintenance of up to $2 billion. Reliability would increase from the present 90-95 percent to 99 percent.”

Over the next 10 years, Oklahoma will need manufacturing capabilities and technical talent to produce these big ideas, Kimpel said. Besides computer scientists to handle massive data, civil engineers for hydrological mapping, meteorologists for weather modeling and private sector companies, the weather center will need political support, he said.

“To move the National Weather Service forecast office from Will Rogers Airport to Norman took five years because it was in two Congressional districts,”

Kimpel said. And establishing the NEXRAD radar network “took a big political fight.”
The science of weather has come a long way since the first tornado forecast was issued at Tinker Air Force Base in 1948, Kimpel said. He predicted much faster progress in the decade ahead.

“We have five years to get ready and another five years to do the work. It will spread across the globe and we can be part of it.”