Radar Anom: Fort Campbell Freaks Out

Radar Anomaly Spotter Zeke pointed out this bizarre animation of our Tennessee Radar this morning and asked what's up.

I'm afraid this one was unavoidable, folks. We can filter out some of the bogus information from the government radars, but in a situation like this, there's nothing we can do.

One of the radars is basically freaking out, sending partial scans, lowballing (8 dBZ) and highballing (95 dBZ!) the data. Here's an animation of the Extended Reflectivity local radar data from Fort Campbell, Kentucky (Accu ID XRW, NWS ID HPX) that we used to make the Tennessee image. Fortunately it takes into account data from other radars so it's not as bad as it could be.

Ideally, the government would shut 'er down during a situation like this, and just transmit nothing, but with the storms coming through this morning I can see why they are trying to keep her up and running. Here's the National Weather Service's explanation from the WeatherMatrix Radar Outage Site:

I don't know exactly what that means, but it doesn't sound good for getting reliable maps from XRW soon. Fortunately, this area is in the thickest radar coverage of the entire U.S., with Paducah directly to its northwest and Nashville directly to its Southeast. Continue to monitor our Tennessee radar or one of those sites until XRW recovers.