OU radar records data from Charley

While Hurricane Charley thrashed trees and ripped apart homes in Florida, it also provided a perfect opportunity for meteorologists at the University of Oklahoma to crunch numbers and use their new Integrated Radar Data Service.

“IRaDS is a program of the university and essentially it’s going to allow us to provide weather technical vendors with top tier, high resolution data,” said Joel Martin, a retired Air Force colonel meteorologist who now operates IRaDS at OU.

Martin, an OU graduate, returned to his native state in April to work on IRaDS, the brainchild of OU professor of meteorology Dr. Kelvin K. Droegmeier. “It provides a very complete 3-D look of the atmosphere,” Martin said.

An at-cost operation through the university, IRaDS provides state and national agencies with data that can be transformed into radar graphics usable for both journalism and scientific analysis.

The technology sends the data with a maximum delay of no more than 10 seconds.

“We’re marrying our very best data to the government and private sector’s graphics,” Martin said.

Carl Sinclair, the system’s technical director, said the information IRaDS sends is greatly compressed. That is how it can be sent so efficiently.

“As the test project continued to grow,” Sinclair said, “the National Weather Service saw the success of it and they quickly wanted to adopt it.”

Hurricane Charley was IRaDS’s first major national test and, technically speaking, “everything went as well as we could have hoped,” Sinclair said.

Martin agreed, noting that the unusual characteristics of the storm may have made IRaDS’s contributions even more important.

“I think the big headline of Charley was the rapid intensification from a Category 2 to a Category 4 storm,” he said.

Charley’s climb in classification occurred over a 12-hour span, barely half the time such intensification usually takes.

Martin speculated that most major research of Charley will begin sometime after hurricane season ends in late October. And there certainly will be research.

“The structure of the hurricane eye was 10 to 15 miles wide and quickly narrowed to five miles wide right as it hit land.”

That interests Martin and many meteorologists. He also feels confident the superior information obtained by IRaDS will help people better understand the storm.

“Now they have a more complete set of data to research,” he said. “(IRaDS) will definitely help the future research of the storm.”