A well-serviced weather radar is seldom broken

When a weather radar stops sending images, it is easy to think that the radar is broken. A survey sent to radar technicians in European countries showed that the fault is rarely in the radar equipment itself.

The stream of images produced by the radar is most often interrupted because of fault situations in power supply or data communications. The radars follow weather hour after hour, day in day out. Typically European weather radars send images at least 95 % of the time. Finnish radar network is top class internationally. It has a general reliability of over 99 %, which means the radars are offline less than 90 hours per year.

More information:

Researcher, FT Elena Saltikoff, tel. +358 29 539 3614, elena.saltikoff@fmi.fiResearcher, DI Mikko Kurri, tel. +358 29 539 5759, mikko.kurri@fmi.fi

Saltikoff, E., M. Kurri, H. Leijnse, S. Barbosa, and K. Stiansen, 2017: Maintenance keeps radars running. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc. doi:10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0095.1, in press

http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/BAMS-D-16-0095.1