Doppler radar is rather new in its use apart from ordinary radar but has no single inventor; Oklahoma City was the first place to use it extensively and even had a fully functioning unit in the 1980s before the FAA Academy right down the road became so equipped.
BUMP!
Q: Being a meteorologist requires knowing advancing technology. How much involvement have you had in helping to advance the field?A. Some. Back in 1978, when you guys weren’t even a whisper in anybody’s imagination, I think, I was following the research at the severe storm center in Norman – they were working on Doppler radar. There used to be big large radars all up near the Arctic Circle and they would intercept any attack from Russia coming across the North Pole. So they took one of those huge radars – huge antennae – took it down to Norman and started to experiment with it. It was the first Doppler radar. So I following research and then when they did their test, it was obvious that it was going to be much better than the conditional radar. So in ’78 I found a company called Enterprise Electronics and asked them if they could build us a Doppler radar, and the reaction, as I recall, was that they had never thought about that. So, to make a long story short, I got with the people who owned the station, the Griffins, and talked them into – this was a long time ago – $250,000 was a huge amount of money – into developing the world’s first commercial Doppler radar. We got it in ’81 and in ’82, after I learned to use it, we issued the first public Doppler warning in history on television. That was March 1982. A tornado hit Ada and killed one person. So we didn’t invent Doppler. Doppler’s been around a long time, but we moved ahead with the private end of the business, the commercial end of the business, television. So after we did it, then it spread across the country. And in ’90 or ’91 we developed the little map you see in the corner of your screen called First Warning. But what we used to do, we had a red piece of paper and had an Oklahoma map, and if there was tornado warning for Oklahoma County, you took an Exacto Knife and you cut out Oklahoma County and put it on there and put a camera on it. And that popped up on your screen. So when computers became a little more popular, ’90 or ’91, we created a program called First Warning, and a little map pops up on the screen and runs a crawl. That was the first one of those that ever existed and we sold those around the country and the station made a lot of money on it. About the same time or shortly thereafter – I don’t know which one came first – we did the storm projection. The way we had done it forever, it seemed like, it this were a pencil, that’s 30 miles on the radar, and you’d figure it would be there in three hours. We were pretty good at guessing. Until we created the program that takes in where the storm is, what speed it’s moving, what direction its going, it projects out, and then you see the towns and the time of arrival will come up on the side of your screen or on the bottom of the screen.