WELDON SPRING, Mo. – It’s a big day at the National Weather Service in Weldon Spring, Missouri, as the radar we all rely on is undergoing a much-needed upgrade.
“We’re going to replace the pedestal inside the radome. That’s what actually spins up in the radar itself. And it’s to extend the life of the radar system. This is 1988 technology; it was installed in the early 1990s, and it’s just time for an upgrade,” Jim Sieveking, the meteorologist in charge at the National Weather Service in St. Louis, said.
This should extend its life by at least another 20 years. The old radar has been going strong for almost 35 years, constantly scanning the sky and helping us see inside storms.
“It spins 24/7/365. So, that’s a lot of hours of it spinning and moving up and down. And so just the gears and things that do that just have failed over time,” Kevin Deitsch, the warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said.
The crew doing the work has traveled all over the country, upgrading numerous other weather service radars.
“So, there’s about 118 radars across the country that this has actually happened to. And we’re one of the last ones to be done,” Sieveking said. “We’re actually number one—the number one radar—the first radar that was installed. Our serial number is number one.”
Once the dome is back in place, the work doesn’t stop there. The upgrades should be completed around March 19.
“It’s not installing it. It’s then testing it to make sure it’s at the specs that it needs to be. Because they did a lot of testing before they started undoing it, basically on Monday and Tuesday,” Sieveking said. “That’s all they’ve done. Going through the specs and making sure that they know what the baseline is so they can return it to that.”
And overlapping radar coverage will keep us safe until it’s back in service.
“This crew is traveling all over the country. Obviously, every part of the country gets weather all times of the year,” Deitsch said. “Here in the Midwest, we get severe weather pretty much all times of the year, so there’s never really a great time to take a weather service radar down, but the crew’s just doing the best they can getting it done as quickly as they can.”