Max Track Live Doppler Radar - Lexington, KY - Weather Radars on Waymarking.com

The following information on the Radar comes from the station's website:

In just the last year, here inCentral Kentucky, we’ve seen softball sized hail, the worst flooding in 20 years along parts of the Kentucky River, a crippling ice storm, and 2 killer tornadoes. There is little doubt that even though we’re not part of tornado alley, our weather can be dangerous.

April 3rd, 1974, 148 tornadoes, including 27 in Kentucky, roared across the United States killing 315 people with an average of more than 2 people killed per tornado. May 3rd to May 11th 2003, more than 400 tornadoes rage across the country, but only 41 people die, 1 person for every 10 tornadoes. One of the reasons for the dramatic drop in fatalities… better technology.

People have learned to count on LEX 18 Storm Tracker weather as the weather authority in our part of Kentucky, which gives us the responsibility to stay at the cutting edge of lifesaving weather technology.

We call it MAX TRACK LIVE DOPPLER RADAR . Plain and simple, it is the most powerful and most accurate live Doppler radar in Kentucky. 350-thousand watts of power and a 14 foot radar dish make this radar even more accurate than the National Weather Service's NEXRAD Doppler for Lexington and surrounding counties. This will give us unprecedented ability to track storms with detailed analysis down to the street…and it will be LIVE.

For comparison, only 1 other Lexington TV station has a live doppler. It has an 8 foot dish and a mere 200 watts of power. Your home computer has about the same amount of power. The lack of power means its radar beam has difficulty penetrating thunderstorms so it can be blind if there are multiple lines of storms. With the small dish, it can't see nearly the detail of MAX TRACK Doppler, so in severe weather it is not as accurate, and the degree of inaccuracy increases with distance.

Time is a precious commodity when severe weather is in the area. MAX TRACK Doppler detects the dangerous twisting of the wind and displays a rotating circle icon, pinpointing the area of greatest danger. This is easily identifiable and gives folks more time to seek shelter. Our threat detector labels areas of high wind, large hail and heavy rain.

Even non-severe thunderstorms pose a danger, which inKentucky is a greater threat than tornadoes, and that’s lightning. MAX TRACK Doppler Radar has a live lightning detector so that as a flash happens it displays on the map within a few seconds. It’s possible you may see the lightning pop on MAX TRACK before you hear the thunder. We’ve already used this feature to help parents planning baseball games, and for protecting our own live trucks out in the field.

For the last several years, we've been showing you the LEX 18 FutureTrack. This has been a great forecasting tool for large weather events like hurricanes, fronts, and snowstorms. However, the technology wasn't available to track individual thunderstorms. With MAX TRACK Doppler we can now apply FutureTrack technology to these individual thunderstorms up to 30 minutes in the future. If a storm is producing a tornado or damaging wind, we can plot a virtual radar display as it moves across Kentucky, warning the communities in its path.

As great as MAX TRACK is, we still can't change the laws of physics. The radar bean does not follow the curve of the Earth, but rather travels in a straight line. What that means is the farther away from Lexington, the higher the beam is off the ground. After a couple of hundred miles, the beam will overshoot even the biggest thunderstorms. We’re getting around those laws by developing a network of LIVE radars throughout the Ohio and Tennessee valleys. We’ll be displaying live radar from Louisville, Cincinnati, and Nashville. No storm can hide from the MAX TRACK Doppler Network.

Is the radar operational?: Yes Radar Operator: WLEX Television Radar Type: Doppler Radar Website: [Web Link]

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