Hurricane Andrew on Radar
0.5^o Elevation Reflectivity Movie

The movie below documents the landfall of Hurricane Andrew at a great distance--177 statute miles from radar tower to landfall of eye in southern Dade County (since renamed Miami-Dade County). NWS Doppler radars were in the process of being installed at the time, and no functional WSR-88D system was closer then the one in Melbourne. [The Miami radar that was destroyed by Andrew was a 1957-vintage non-Doppler unit powered by vacuum tubes. Ironically, its downfall greatly sped up the planning and construction of the Miami Doppler radar--ironically, in an area of southern Dade County very hard-hit by Andrew and labeled KAMX on the loop map.]

Because of the long intervening distance, the radar only saw the middle and upper levels of the storm. That is illustrated in an eastward-looking vertical cross-section that I constructed using this 0.5^o beam-tilt image as reference. Also, see this 3-D view looking NE across the storm at the same time.

At landfall, the beam entered the stadium-shaped eye at about 23,000 feet aloft and left it at 26,000 feet. As the beam got further south, toward far southern Dade and the Upper Keys, it overshot more and more of the storm's rain. Because of that, the hurricane looks lopsided; however, it was actually much more dense and symmetric than shown here. It also was well beyond the rangeof MLB velocity products. Still, the data is prized because it offers the only opportunity for a complete radar animation of Andrew as it tracked entirely across South Florida.

The javascript loop contains 59 images at 1070 x 858 pixels each, representing every scan from 715Z (3:15 a.m. EDT) to 12:56Z (8:56 a.m. EDT), and occupying almost 20 MB of disc space. As such, it maybe slow to load, especially on low-bandwidth connections.

The loop can be stopped, restarted, and advanced one frame forward or backward at a time manually, usng the controls at the top. You also can speed up or slow down the animation using the speed bar.

PHOTOGRAPHIC NOTES: All images were created from WSR-88D Level-2 data archived at NCDC, via GR-Level-2^TM software. Thanks to Rich Thompson for his aid in downloading the data.

Roger Edwards SkyPix Gallery: Hurricane Andrew

Full SkyPix weather photo gallery

Roger and Elke's Digital Photography Galleries

Roger and Elke's Storms Observed BLOG

THE END