Central Alabama radar outage scheduled while rain moves through area

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) – Starting Friday morning, the National Weather Service radar that services central Alabama will be down for upgrades. While the radar is offline, some rain and storms are expected to move through the area.

However, NWS say this outage is not reason to panic. Despite the downed radar, the NWS says the area will still be covered Friday.

“We have so much overlap here in the state of Alabama. We have multiple radars from Huntsville down to Mobile,” NWS Birmingham Meteorologist in Charge Chris Darden said. “If we go down, like [Friday], we’re going to be down [Friday] into Saturday, but really we won’t see a lot of degradation of service.”

Along with these other radars across the state, the NWS says other tools are used to monitor the weather.

“We have high resolution satellite data, which gives us a lot of information, we have other tools as well, high resolution modeling. So it’s not just radar data, we have other tools that we use in conjunction to give us the best picture of what’s going on,” Darden said.

The NWS says the radar upgrades will help with reliability. The upgrades will include two main parts, getting rid of outdated equipment the radar no longer needs and repairing the pedestal to reduce vibrations that have come about over the decades of use. The NWS hopes this will extend the life of the radar.

“Short term, I think you’re going to see less radar outages, less down time. Long term the weather service is looking at a longer-range project,” said Darden. “What does our radar system look like 10-20 years down the road? Are we going to continue to refurbish the NEXRAD systems or are we going to look at other technologies? That question is still yet to be answered.”

Darden says it’s better to have an outage like this planned over the summer than in the spring during tornado season.