Talk:Weather radar

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Sorry but the article is not finished yet but the structure is:

• Historical facts.
• Description of what is specific to weather radar compared to other radars.
• Products available with the data obtained
• Limitations of weather data

To my knowledge, an encyclopedic article should explain the ins and outs of a subject not only light talk.

Pierre_cb 02:37 GMT 2006-05-15

Sounds like a good outline plan. My main motivation for tagging the article with "cleanup" was:

• Formulas are presented without proper description and derivation. It is e.g. impossible to determine what etc. stands for.
• Engeneering rule of thumbs and examples, like e.g: "of 300 m and beam width of 1 degree, this gives a scanned volume of 0,001 km3 at 10 km range and of the order of one kilometer3 at 200 km", should be moved into separate "examples" subsection, since they provide little general insight into the underlying principles of weather radars. --Fredrik Orderud 18:01, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Good points, the comes from the radar article and I assumed wrongly that it would be obvious. So I will restate them as I did in other equations.

As for the "rules of thumbs", that you mention, they probably lack context For instance, the example you mention about the scanned volume is very important as the radar beam sample on different size volumes with distance which affect the average of the return. I wanted the reader to have an idea already but I should probably elaborate. Maybe I should transfert it to the last section on limitations where I will detail the hypothesis and limitations of weather data.

If you have more suggestions, don't hesitate. Pierre_cb 20:32 GMT 2006-05-15

Contents 1 Completion 2 To do 3 Frequencies 4 Pulse volume formula

[edit] Completion

My input for the article is now complete. I've tried to be as Wiki as I know. If anyone has comments on the material or layout, I would like to hear them.

Pierre_cb 14:41 GMT 2006-05-17

[edit] To do

• The history section should be converted to prose-style, as opposed to a list of events.
• Where possible, use non-technical language.

Runningonbrains 21:24, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Question: How do you talk about a technical subject without using well explained technical terms? Looking for seeing that. Pierre cb 11:43, 4 September 2006 (UTC)

We had the same problem in the extratropical cyclone article. I'd mention a simple description of the technical terms, when and where they are first used. Thegreatdr 23:59, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, the problem comes when technical terms aren't explained, and compounded when poor writing confuses even technical readers. I'm working on fixing these kinds of problems with this article; I'll ask some particular technical questions so we can clear things up. -- Beland 02:51, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Frequencies

What frequencies bands do weather radars use? S-band links to this article, for example. -- Beland 22:12, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

Weather radar uses wavelenghts that are typically 10 times the diameters of the targets in order to obey the Rayleight law. That means centimetric wavelengths and usually 1 to 10 cm. The shorter the wavenlength the more attenuation, so 10 cm (S-band) is favored but its cost is greater so 5 cm C-band is often used. 3 cm X-band is used only in very short distance radars and 1 cm L-band only for research of drizzle and fog. All this is mentionned in the article, in particular in the "Principles of radar in meteorology" section. Pierre cb 04:48, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

Interesting. I'll add your explanation to the article. Thanks! -- Beland 02:19, 2 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pulse volume formula

• It looks like the beam width "theta" is supposed to be the diameter of the cross-section of a beam which is assumed to be circular? Is that an accurate assumption?
• Is the radius "r" supposed to be the calculated from the beginning, middle, or end of the pulse? Is the h*r^2*theta^2 formula approximate or exact?

-- Beland 03:10, 2 January 2007 (UTC)