CAMANO ISLAND — As soon as next fall, it’ll be easier to tell how big a punch a storm packs as it approaches from the Pacific Ocean.
A $9 million Doppler radar station under construction near Copalis Beach on the coast north of Ocean Shores will see what the current station at Camano Island cannot.
“Right over there is the Olympic Mountains,” said Steve Genser of Marysville, electronics technician for the National Weather Service in Seattle.
The mountains block the Camano Island station radar’s view of everything behind them, from their western slopes out into the ocean, officials say.
The weather service relies on satellite images for views of that section of the ocean.
The new radar will give forecasters a three-dimensional image “versus the two-dimensional, top-down image you see from a satellite,” said Don Price, head technician for the weather service in Seattle.
This will provide more accurate estimates for rainfall and wind speed, Price said.
Weather officials credit to U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, who lives in Edmonds, for getting the money for the new station. She first obtained funds for a 2009 study showing the gaps in the system and then pushed for the funding for the station, according to a written statement.
The first bundle of cash for the station, $2 million, was appropriated in 2009 while the other $7 million was approved last year, officials said. The new station could be completed as soon as September.
The weather service in 2007 studied the idea of contracting with broadcast media outlets for use of their private radar stations, said Jared Leopold, a spokesman for Cantwell’s office. Seattle station KCPQ channel 13 has stations in Neah Bay and Kitsap County, and KING-5 has a station at Sea-Tac Airport.
The idea was rejected because these stations use less sophisticated equipment and don’t provide the same quality of data as the National Weather Service stations, Leopold said.
The media outlets use their stations to supplement the information they receive from the stations run by the weather service, said Ted Buehner, warning coordination meteorologist for the weather service.
The new station at the coast will have another advantage. It will send out vertically shaped radar signals as opposed to the horizontal signals sent out by even the best radar stations now. The new technology is called dual polarization, or polarimetric, radar.
When the signals bounce back, they show clouds in greater depth, enabling forecasters to better predict the type, intensity, and duration of precipitation.
“It’s expected to have a much better feel for the rain versus snow line and better precipitation estimates,” Buehner said.
It also is better able to distinguish hail from rain and better pinpoint thunderstorms.
The weather service plans to retrofit the station at Camano Island, and eventually all the others in its system of roughly 170 around the nation, with dual polarization technology, officials say.
Otherwise, the new station will look and operate much like the one at Camano and others in the Northwest at Portland, Spokane and Pendleton, Ore.
The station consists of three small buildings and a tower.
Rising above the trees on Camano is the 90-foot tower, atop which sits what looks like a giant, dark green volleyball. It’s actually housing for the radar dish that is slowly rotating inside, Genser said.
The dish, 25 feet in diameter, starts off flat and tilts up slightly, makes several turns, tilts up a little more, makes several more turns, and repeats the process, up to 19 degrees above the horizon. Then it lays back flat and repeats the process, Genser said. It sends and picks up signals as far as 250 miles away.
The dish is powered by a magnetron, a tube that converts high-voltage electricity from the power grid to microwave radiation. It’s similar to the device found in a microwave oven except it’s about the size of a garbage can, housed in a small building beneath the tower.
The power that flows into the magnetron is backed up by a large diesel-powered generator housed in a separate building, and a battery-powered generator about the size of two refrigerators housed in the third building.
The radiation runs up the tower through a hollow white pipe. The dish sends its signals back down to the same building, where the raw data appears on a computer screen. The data is sent via phone line to the weather service’s Seattle headquarters at Sand Point, where it is refined further into the images used by TV stations, Genser said.
Other than the enclosure around the dish, the tower is open to the elements. There’s no elevator — technicians must trek up and down about nine stories of metal steps to perform maintenance on the small parts inside the enclosure that keep the dish running.
The station is unmanned most of the time. Genser visits at least once a month to check the functions. If there’s any kind of a problem, he has to drive there to check it out.
If the power or phone line goes out — even at 2 a.m. — he has to visit the station to make sure the problem is caused by external factors and not within the station.
“I’ve done that more than once,” he said.
Bill Sheets: 425-339-3439; sheets@heraldnet.com.
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