OT: Weather radar...

[Graham.]

...from space, apaerantly.

[Brian Gaff (Sofa)]

Not exactly new news though, several weeks ago perhaps? It happens several times each summer. its nature at work setting up new ant colonies by moving new queens into new areas. Not very many of them survive, its a brute force way of expanding the species. Brian

[alan_m]

Very suspect story or reporting. Can weather radar from space see as little as a thousand raindrops/ants.

[Andy Burns]

I think the point Graham is making is that it's shitty reporting, the radars are on the ground, but because the result is visualised as though from above it must involve "S P A C E" ...

[jon]

space-over-uk-12030835

I have a strange picture from the dark side of the moon that shows a feature that could be either an artifact of film development or a genuine construction.

[nightjar]

It is ground radar and it has been designed to differentiate between rain, snow and hail, so probably can tell when it sees insects instead.

[Paul]

The detection was done with Doppler Radar from the ground.

Secondary information was provided by IR and visible wavelength photos of the country from space. Using those photos, there was insufficient cloud cover, to conclude the Doppler radar could be imaging rain. So information from space was used but only as a means to re-enforce what the Doppler saw.

This story (including the same picture) was on my local news here on July 19th.

Paul

[Roger Hayter]

I suspect the "thousands" quote was mistaken by several orders of magnitude. Our garden alone must provide something in the high hundreds, and there are millions of gardens.

[Andrew]

Odd that they don't seem to spot all those dingys heading our way until they have crossed the midpoint of the channel.

I often wonder what would happen if a flotilla of UK inshore fishing boats got anywhere near the midpoint at about midnight on a nice calm night. Pretty sure the Frence border force boats would be out immediately.

[Paul]

Doppler radar is used to image a slice of atmosphere at 10,000 feet. It doesn't double as a boat-traffic-monitor.

And the overhead surveillance isn't good enough for tracking everything. It's used for "hot spots". Google Earth has high resolution, but to update the view of the Earth from space, is taking a year or two. I don't see anything to suggests the capability is "continuous" and "real time".

We still fly coastal patrols here, for fisheries compliance. We wouldn't have to do that if the satellite fleet was "magic".

Paul

[Andy Burns]

Mostly the closer zoom-level images come from planes, not satellites.

[Andrew]

Dover coastguard operate a very powerful radar system for monitoring shipping. It is specially designed so it only operates as it sweeps the 180? degree arc across to Calais but noone in Kent behind that sender/receiver gets a dose of microwaves.

[polygonum_on_google]

Bring back the Shackletons!

[Andrew]

10,000 rivets flying in close formation :-)