“It completely changed our target area,’’ Kuhlman said. “The emergency manager got on the radio, and with literally minutes to spare, got EMS and fire to move, possibly out of the way of the storm.’’
The system Kuhlman used is part of a $43 million, 10-year project called CASA, for Collaborative Adaptive Sensing of the Atmosphere, that engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have been leading since 2003.
Funded by a highly competitive National Research Foundation grant, CASA is a partnership with state universities in Colorado, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, Virginia, and Delaware, the National Weather Service, technology giants Raytheon Co. and ITT Corp., and specialty manufacturers including EWR Weather Radar and Vaisala, and Weathernews Inc.
The project’s goal, director David J. McLaughlin said, is to create a better hazardous-weather warning system that gives geographically specific, actionable information to all who need it.
The United States has the best Doppler network in the world, McLaughlin said, and it does “a pretty good job’’ with tornadoes, issuing warnings for 80 percent. But roughly 80 percent of warnings turn out to be false alarms, and none are very specific.
Take the June 1 tornadoes that hit Western Massachusetts.
In the Springfield area, there were three deaths, hundreds of injuries, and at least $90 million in damages. Yet 20 miles north, Amherst, where sirens were also sounded, had just a rainstorm. The problem, McLaughlin explained, is that the current system, called NEXRAD and deployed in the 1990s at a cost of $2 billion, has significant coverage gaps and provides coarse-grain data.
NEXRAD uses 159 high-powered radars, positioned atop towers about 200 miles apart, to cover the country. It offers a good big-picture perspective, McLaughlin said, but because of the radars’ elevation and the Earth’s curvature, it can’t see storms close to the ground.
The Dopplers also take a relatively long time to do their 360-degree scans, updating weather data only every five minutes. For fast-moving storms, that’s too long, Kuhlman said.
