Historical Weather Radar for Search Planning?

[Thom]

Sorry I didn't have time to search more completely for any earlier threads on this topic, but it's been a long weekend.

We found a couple of tools today, but I was somewhat surprised at the lack of readily available Historical Weather Radar data for use in planning a search for a missing plane.  The AFRCC was helpful in general terms and in trying to forensically locate a track for the subject aircraft, but they couldn't give us a simple picture of the NEXRAD weather from the time the flight started.

All we wanted was to see the NEXRAD output for the area where the flight originated back a couple of days ago, so we could better estimate which possible routes the pilot might have taken to avoid the weather in the area.  It seems this would be some of the most basic data for planning a search where weather is remotely suspected, but getting anything more than static reported conditions at launch time was time consuming.

I eventually found the weather center at Plymouth State http://vortex.plymouth.edu/u-make.html which allowed us to provide some very useful weather imagery from the flight departure time a couple of days ago.  Essentially their tools will allow you to pull up NEXRAD radar images for any area in the 48 states, for any quarter hour period after 2002, so the last 8 years is online at the click of a mouse.  But they weren't referenced in any ES or SAR guidelines that anyone had handy, nor was any suitable substitute known by AFRCC or the ICP staff. We eventually provided this info to 3 ICPs in different Wings, all of whom said they did not already have the data.

Is there a standard toolset for this function that CAP is supposed to be using that everyone is just overlooking?

If not, what is everyone else using to plan searches when you need to know what weather the pilot would have seen more than a few hours ago?

FYI, the FSS folks could only give us the weather report at the departure airport at the time of departure, which was markedly different from the weather just a few miles away in multiple directions at that time, according to what we eventually saw on the historical radar images.

Thanks!

Thom

[sardak]

I've given presentations on finding current and archived weather for emergency services. I don't have access to my materials right now, but here are a few links that I have handy. All these sites are free. There is no reason to pay for current or archived weather information.
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National Center for Atmospheric Research
http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/

Real-time and archived weather.  NEXRAD radar, surface and satellite archives hourly for 5 days, hourly METAR data for 60 hours. These all can be viewed as single or looped images.

Though the NEXRAD single images are hourly, the loops use the individual NEXRAD images, not just the top of the hour images. Depending on which mode the radar was in, the images may be in increments from 4 to 12 minutes, which means there can be quite a few images to loop. The loop can be stopped so that individual images can be copied. These are actual NEXRAD images and not the RCM that Plymouth State uses. That's not a dig on them, as I use its data, also.

The satellite imagery is similar. Though the single images are hourly, the loops use images which are generally 15 minutes apart.

I've taken the individual radar and satellite images, georeferenced them in GIS software and overlaid other data including NTAP tracks and Sarsat hits.
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National Climatic Data Center Main Radar Page - The actual raw NEXRAD data is available from NOAA and goes back years. This is pretty hard core and too much to explain here. NOAA provides a free, GIS based viewer.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/radar/radardata.html
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NOAA Geostationary Satellite Server - images every 30 minutes for the last 21 days
http://www.goes.noaa.gov/index.html

Scroll down to GOES East Archive/GOES West Archive in left frame
Select satellite
Choose desired parameters
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For local weather conditions, there are thousands of weather stations across the country that now provide data via the Internet. Some are government operated, others are personal stations. Many report as often as every 10 minutes and much of the data is archived. NOAA uses the data from these stations to improve its products and the NTSB has begun using information from these sources in crash investigation, since official reporting stations may be many miles away. Some sites which have this:

MesoWest - Operated by the University of Utah

http://mesowest.utah.edu/index.html

CWOP - Citizen Weather Observer Program - developed by ham radio operators

http://www.wxqa.com/stations.html

MADIS - Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System - run by NOAA

http://madis.noaa.gov/sfc_display/

NOAA Mesonet

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/gmap.php?zoom=3&extents=-9.622414,-177.890625,68.720441,-31.992187&density=1

NOAA Aviation Weather Mesonet
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/zoa/mwmap3.php?map=usa

Weather Underground

http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/?lat=38.54817&lon=-95.80078&zoom=4

Mike

[Thom]

I've given presentations on finding current and archived weather for emergency services. I don't have access to my materials right now, but here are a few links that I have handy. All these sites are free. There is no reason to pay for current or archived weather information.

<snip copious amounts of useful links>

Mike

Mike, thanks so much for all the info and links.  That was EXACTLY what I was looking for, with one exception (not your fault):

WHY are these sources not a standard reference available to AFRCC and the ICs? We had three Wings involved, including one of the largest, and no one had ready knowledge of these sources.

As it turns out, it appears weather was a factor in the unfortunate outcome of the incident, and the info wouldn't have helped save lives in this particular circumstance, but having this information sooner might very well help save lives on the next SAR mission.

I guess as someone who is still relatively new to CAP (<2 years) I'm perplexed that one of the single most informative information streams is relegated to being acquired from less than optimal sources and methods.  Worse, there appears to be little effort to provide even a standardized selection of weather information to ICs, aside from FSS, which was almost disinformation in this case.

Thanks, again!

Thom

[Short Field]

Great resources - thanks