Daily evidence of climate change. This is getting so silly

[libertypirate]

Just about every day I spend some time perusing http://www.spc.noaa.gov/. The "Storm Prediction Center" SPC for short is a mosaic of coordinated localized instrumentation as well as satellite data all brought together in one place.

The nice pattern of blue dots in the middle doesn't move. Hasn't for the couple of months that I have been visiting the SPC. What weather pattern is so predictable that it never moves? The only thing that does change is intensity.

[Blues Heron]

1. Ground clutter?

[lldu]

2. Exactly, Ground Clutter

In Arkansas and states surrounding it, those look like the locations of the Weather Radar. I bet it is ground clutter.

[Viking12]

4. That'd be my guess. Looks like most of the areas are metro areas..

Minnepolis, Greenbay, Fargo, etc...

[tkmorris]

3. It's ground clutter, a satellite artifact

That's not weather you are seeing, it is essentially noise, much like snow on an analog television broadcast. Every place that has one of those "blue dots" you speak of is a NWS satellite station.

[libertypirate]

8. There are more stations then dots. /nt

[lapfog_1]

5. Ground clutter from near doppler radar sites.

Their filtering software needs to have these locations identified and apply other rules to normalize the data from them (so that the ground clutter is removed but without leaving "holes" in a storm that actually passes over one).

You can safely ignore them.

Oh, you can find out exactly where each NWS doppler radar site is located by going to www.wunderground.com (weatherunderground).

[libertypirate]

7. Ground clutter... How does one station always generate a signature

and others never do.

http://radar.weather.gov/

So what about the other half of the radar stations; where is the ground clutter signatures for them?

[lapfog_1]

9. A lot depends on where the radar is located.

and the surrounding topology.

For example, my local doppler radar is located on a peak in the Empirita Mountains near Tucson, AZ. However, there are nearby ranges of mountains, namely the Whetstones that have some higher peaks. Those surrounding peaks (even if they aren't taller than the radar site) show up as "ground clutter". Worse, the really tall peaks in the Whetstones block the radar from seeing storm tracks for portions of the San Pedro river valley, including me. So, when storms track in from the southwest, I have to guess and interpolate where they are in relation to me and when they might reach me. You'll see a big nasty cell (summer time) sweep in from Mexico over Sierra Vista and then simply vanish (according to doppler). Sometimes they DO vanish (dissipate) but usually they are just not visible to the radar.

But on clear days like tonight, if you look at the NEXRAD system for Tucson, you'll see a lot of "speckles" around the radar site.

On a national map, I suppose they look like what you see.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

6. It looks very official.

For 1994.