NORMAN - The basics were discovered in various places and used in many ways, but this is where things all came together to revolutionize weather forecasting.

History, geography and technology converged in this university town to develop practical Doppler weather radar, researchers say. And it has made Oklahoma the hub of weather radar.

This place was a natural. Because of its location, Oklahoma had the severe weather, and beginning in the 1960s, the state had a new laboratory for weather and the researchers to study it, Kelvin Droegemeier said.

"It was the perfect place to try to prove this stuff," said Droegemeier, a University of Oklahoma meteorology professor. "It all kind of tied together historically."

Bouncing radio waves off objects in the distance - radar, as it came to be known - had been a key military technology during World War II. And scientists realized that the Doppler Effect, known for more than a century, applied to those waves, said Bob Palmer, meteorology professor and electrical engineering adjunct professor at OU.

"The modern developments were all military related," he said.

But it wasn't until a decade after the war that work began in earnest on using Doppler radars to analyze weather. For the military, weather patterns detected by the widely used "reflective" radar was an annoyance, a hindrance to their real goal, which was spotting enemy aircraft.

For weather researchers, it was a valuable tool, Droegemeier said.

In the 1950s, British researchers took the first measurements of weather with pulsed Doppler radar. And in the 1960s and 1970s, researchers at OU and the National Severe Storms Laboratory in Norman, along with the Air Force Geophysics Lab in Boston, advanced and refined the technology.

The two labs produced the first models of the long wavelength Doppler radars in use today, said Doug Forsythe, chief of radar research and development at the National Severe Storms Laboratory.

But researchers here were the first to take the next huge step - pulse pair processors. Until that leap in hardware, Doppler radar data had to be gathered and then digested over hours or days. Pulse pair processors allowed Doppler radar data to be used instantly.

"We could actually see the velocities coming toward or away from the radars in real time," Forsythe said.

The future of radar technology here also is bright and busy, Forsythe said. Researchers are preparing to implement "dual polarization" radar, a system researchers here have been developing since the 1970s. Current systems view weather radar data polarized only in one plane, either vertical or horizontal, Forsythe said. With dual polarization, researchers will be able to view weather data in both planes simultaneously.

The next advance in the works here, Forsythe said, is "phased array" radar. With this system, radio beams are directed electronically rather than by the traditional method of mechanically rotating a dish, "which allows you to change the direction of the beam every one-thousandth of a second," Forsythe said.

All the technologies studied, refined and developed here, Droegemeier said, have made Oklahoma "the real focal point for radar development in the world." The state has the potential for even more, he said. It could become the center of manufacturing of radar systems that could be used around the world.

"That's something we really ought to try to do," he said. "We want to really seize that opportunity."

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