13 Alert Radar network expands to College Station with new radar at Texas A&M University
COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KTRK) -- The ABC13 Alert Radar network has been bringing you the best coverage in southeast Texas for the past year, and it's about to get even better.
We're debuting our newest radar in the network, located right in the heart of Aggieland at Texas A&M University -- where Chief Meteorologist Travis Herzog and Meteorologist Rachel Briers studied meteorology.
Rachel stopped by A&M to see the installation of the newest 13 Alert Radar.
READ MORE: How ABC13's new 13 Alert Radar network provides more accurate severe weather coverage
"So the weather radar that we're bringing to the Texas A&M campus is a gap-filling weather radar. It's intended to supplement the great network that we already have in the country and to fill some low-level data voids closer to the ground," Tara Leigh Goode with Climavision said. "Not only is it going to fill that void in observation and fill the whole 60-mile radius, but it's going to benefit the atmospheric science program here. The students will be able to interact with this data in their research projects and all other real-time forms as well."
If you've visited Texas A&M's campus, you've surely seen the O&M building with its iconic radar on top.
Rachel said learning and interacting with the old radar was a significant benefit when she was a student, but the new radar will have even more capabilities.
ABC13 spoke to Dr. Erik Nielson-- who is a Texas A&M atmospheric sciences professor and also an Aggie classmate of Rachel's -- about the benefits of the new x-band radar.
"When we start talking about the new radar, which is dual-polarization, it will shoot out a beam that's oscillating horizontally, but also one that's oscillating vertically, so we will get a 2-D vision of what we see. So we will more readily be able to identify hail or large raindrops," Dr. Nielson said.
The radar will be an immense benefit for College Station and the surrounding area, but it will also be a game changer for tracking storms into Houston.
"If you think about the radars that are around the area, you have the main National Weather Service radar, which I believe is on FM-646 in Galveston County, which is a very, very long-range radar. But then you have higher-resolution radars at both Intercontinental and Houston Hobby. And then this one here," Dr. Nielson said. "So if you look at all of those radars, you have nesting coverage kind of moving upstream, or where things might be coming from, to the Houston area, which would allow kind of a cohesive picture of something where you have all these different radar data coming together, and using that to understand what's happening."
We are also so excited that the new radar will be an educational tool for the next generation of meteorologists.
"And that's where the educational value is hugely as well, because students are going to be seeing things as they look around," Dr. Nielson said. "And so now, they can look out the window, they can see what they're looking at, and then they can see it in high-resolution data on the radar screen and be able to build those concepts."
