it used to be, but now its just something they add so you don't think you are looking at a static screen. No news program uses an actual live feed from the radar anymore as the processed images look much better.
As someone born in 2001, the technology advancements from 1989-2029 are absolutely insane
We've seen more technological advancement in the last 40 years than parts of civilization have seen for over half a millenia. I think there is an argument 1200-1700 had less technological advancement than 1976-2026
My coworkers are mainly 22-35 and they don’t believe me on basic stuff like
… my family got our first microwave when I was in middle school
… my university started a computer lab on 1990 with 6 computers and 2 dot matrix printers
… I got a pager for work in 1996, on my 3rd job after graduation
… got a blackberry in 1999, flip phone in 2001
And my bosses told us all the time how terrible the economy was in the 1990s.
Um, just asking, but does the FAA or some airports still use that voice on the ATIS broadcast? I swear I hear that for the weather and airport information to pilots in some aviation videos I watch!
Nice! But it's it with modern radar that the rotation is synthetic? Should be much faster given each pulse travels at the speed of light.
Like I would expect multiple scans per second. (Maybe not 360° update as with a flat radar plate you might just cover ≈180° with shifting the direction synthetically, but still...)
If you look closely, the sweep does update the screen.... every five minutes or so. Pay attention during your next severe weather event and you'll see it.
Wrong quote. This is not an Asshole, this is the radar tech. The following quote is "You know the Bleeps(imitates bleeping noise) the Sweeps (imitates sweeping noise) and the Creeps (imitates creeping noise) Dark Helmet "that's not all his lost" with the tech pointing at the screen and "sir, the radar it appears to be Jammed".
Never has this quote being for a perfect occasion but you chose to continue the one we have all used before. u/standardissuegreen even set it up perfectly.
Nope, the composite radar is only generated after a complete 360-degree sweep is done across all the nearby regional or national (depending on view) radar sites. It's not done in real time.
I'm a pilot, and we're trained that weather radar imagery we get from the ground is delayed 5-20 minutes because of the processing + transmittal time. I believe 5 minutes is the lower bound based on how often the composite image gets rebuilt for the regional images, and 15 minutes for the national images.
We also sometimes have an onboard weather radar which is instant - but that's just raw radar data straight from the clouds in front of us.
Kinda proving my point. It COULD be seconds but weather doesn't change that quickly so they only send updates that often. The raw data is all there and it's all getting processed.
I know what you mean but the wording is inaccurate because everything a radar produces is already processed. The raw reception signal of a radar antenna is mostly noise, the useful data in it is several orders of magnitude lower than noise and needs to be extracted using a LOT of different filters and algorithms.
And keep in mind that depending on which modality the radar is operating, each sweep (rotation) scans a different antenna elevation angle. So depending on the mode, it could take up to five to fifteen 360° sweeps at 1/2 to 6 RPM to generate a composite of the maximum echo return at any elevation over a specific location on the ground, which is then processed and sent to the end user.
I doubt the on-screen sweeps are synced to the modality of the radar these days, unless it’s a privately-owned system. An on-screen sweep may or may not approximate the actual rotation; it’ll be more coincidental than anything. But if you know the on-screen sweep timing, you can kind of guesstimate how many sweeps it’ll take before it updates, and if nothing else, it points out the location of the radar.
That said, that’s a really big boom to generate a quite a bit of reflectivity that propagated out to at least a six mile radius from the origin.
They still sometimes switch to real-time/live radar during live storm coverage in the midwest. You can see it updating at the sweep line. Source: Live here.
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u/Jonnyflash80 1d ago
Nice overly slow fake radar sweep they've added to the map. 😂