NEXRAD class at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute

As part of Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at the University of Oklahoma, I co-taught a class on NEXRAD Weather Radar.

The nearly month long class — “NEXRAD Weather Radar: How it works and what those images tell us” — focused on the NEXRAD radar network, including how the signal is transmitted, received and processed, and upgrades like Dual Polarization.

OLLI promotes lifelong learning and personal growth of adults aged 50 years and older through a variety of non-credit courses. The purpose of our course was for people to better understand how the national weather warning system works, improve personal safety habits and provide exposure of OU’s national and global importance in meteorology, weather radar education and research.

As challenging as it was to explain complex radar engineering concepts to non experts, it was a fun and rewarding experience. As scientists, I believe it’s very important to engage with our community to socialize the critical role of CIMMS in support of the NOAA mission. We were able to present the critical relationship between radar engineering and the needs of the meteorologists when they use the radar images. Our goal was for the members to gain an appreciation of how difficult and complex it is to build and maintain the NEXRAD fleet. By using case studies of significant weather events, we taught them how to interpret the images and showed them how the radar supports the NWS meteorologists in making critical warning decisions.

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