fig. 11.—photograph illustrating appearance of R scope when antenna is directed vertically and echoes are received from rain and snow, p. 1274 from the compendium of meteorology, 1951 (internet archive)
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Mais il n'y a rien là pour la Science. Editor, New York Review of Wasps.
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in reply to @fungi's post:
I even understand approximately how it works and what this picture means. I used to study lightning hits to tall structures and one of my tasks was to watch a radar (*which might have been not exactly a radar) when we expected a storm in the area, and thus study some meteorology as a result.
ooh thats so cool! i mostly looked at this because i liked the words "rain echo" and "echo intensity" but i tried to read the pages from the book this was from to get a sense of what was going on and unsurprisingly did not understand much lol
My understanding is very rudimental, so please don't take it as anything definite, but as I understood it, the as radar turns it sends a bunch of waves of certain wavelength. When they encounter anything on their path these waves reflect / absorb depending on what it is and there is a bunch of physics involved, but the radar is able to see what portion of the waves and where (and when, as all radars also take into account the timing) is reflected/absorbed and how, and based upon it it gives you a picture. Basically snow and rain (having different temperatures and density and physics in general) have different echoprints, so this is how radar knows/people guess if there is a storm expected tomorrow.
In a sense it is how bat echolocation works, but a bit more complicated, because radars can be built in a number of configurations and some don't even rotate.
thank u for writing all that i feel like i have basic understanding of how echolocation works but didn't connect how they're sort of similar..... always in awe of how ppl figured this all out
I just realized myself that radars are giant technological eldritch ur-bats, in a sense.
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