Later today we will be officially launching what we think is the best radar system in the Ozarks. We truly believe that all of the tools of StormVision 3D Radar will provide a level of severe weather coverage unmatched in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. With the tools we now have, we'll be able to better analyze storms and storm structure, focus our attention on the storms with the greatest tornado and severe weather potential, and highlight the areas of highest concern. All of this to give you and your family more time to prepare for dangerous weather!

Watch KSPR News at 4:30, 5:30, and 10:00. Kevin Lighty will show you what all the new features look like on-air! 

Below, you'll find in-depth descriptions of many of the tools we will have available to us in times of bad weather. You'll also get a behind-the-scenes look at what we're seeing on our computers during severe weather coverage.

StormVision 3D Radar ingests radar data from up to five different radar sites including those in Springfield, Kansas City, Tulsa, OK, St. Louis, Fort Smith, AR, and Little Rock. Having multiple radar sites available to us allows us to have the best look at thunderstorms regardless of where it is in our viewing area. Depending on where the storm is we can switch radar sources to get the absolute best view of the storm.

Perhaps the biggest difference you'll see on-air is our ability to look at a cross section or an x-ray of the storm and look at storms in 3D.

This has many advantages to a meteorologist. We can look at storm structure which gives us a much better idea of what the greatest threats are. There are meteorological features we can look at that tell us whether a tornado may soon form or whether a hail core is aloft or dropping from the storm. These are things that 3D imaging allow us to see very quickly.

On normal radar imagery you see only one level of the storm (even though radar is scanning up to 16 layers of the storm) like you see below. This is still great for analyzing the storms and this is what we will be looking at and showing on-air the most often.

But even better is being able to look at all level of the storm at the same time. One example of this can be found in the image below of a cross section of a storm in Texas. I've circled the area where there could be an elevated area of hail aloft and by looking at the storm in 3D we can tell is has not yet reached the ground.

CellPath is an amazing tool that I think is one of the most valuable attributes of StormVision 3D Radar. CellPath utilizes something called WDT data, a set of algorithms that automatically analyzes individual storm cells and gives us very detailed information on each storm. This allows us to focus our own analyzation on the storms that need it the most and spend more time sharing the most important information with viewers.

We can choose a storm cell and look at up to 30 different attributes related to that storm. This is part of the control screen we see.

Some of the parameters we can track include (but are not limited to) probability of tornado, probability of severe weather, strength of the mesocyclone (rotation), how high or low the rotation is in the storm, and many, many others.

Not only can we see what the CURRENT value is we can track each indice over time which tells us whether the storm is increasing or decreasing in strength. For example, we would be increasingly concerned with this storm cell as the graph (going back 25 minutes) shows increasing probabilities of a tornado. The value went from near 10 percent 25 minutes ago to more than 65 percent 5 minutes ago. All of this information is available at just a quick glance.

From this data, our radar system will plot the worst parts of the storm (whether it is hail, high winds, or rotation and possible tornado). You'll often see the icons below appear on screen and here is what they mean.

 This indicates a hail core shaft is indicated by radar and is representative of where the largest hail is likely falling within the storm. On-air we can click on the icon and it provides information on expected hail size.

This is our downburst indicator. It represents an area of the storm where damaging winds are likely.

This is our mesocyclone indicator. It indicates areas where strong rotation is taking place and is an area of the storm we watch closely for tornadic development. On-air we can click on the icon and it provides information on probability of tornado and probability of severe weather. In January we started showing the "Probability of Tornado" percentage on-air and it proved to be extremely accurate.

To get this number, the computer has analyzed 25,000 other thunderstorms and it compares the storm cell we are tracking to those in the database. If the current thunderstorm is similar to 1,000 storms in the database and of those storms 800 produced tornadoes, the storm would have a "Probability of Tornado" rating of 80%. With the storms in January, we found that when the number was above 70 percent there was almost always a tornado on the ground!

HailZONE is a tool that predicts where hail will fall over the next 30 minutes. it bases this information on storm movement and hail attributes within the storm. The system draws a polygon in the areas that are likely to be affected similar to what you see below.

On-air we can click on the zones to find out an estimate of how big the hail will be.

On our system we can also list towns that fall within the zone and give expected time of arrival.

Similar to HailZONE, GustZONE draws a polygon around the area that has the greatest threat of seeing damaging winds within the next 30 minutes. It will show cities affected and expected time of arrival times.

 You've seen this product on the air already and it has been a valuable and extremely accurate tool showing us how much rain has fallen with thunderstorms and even just showers. It takes radar estimates and compares them to ground truth reports to come up with much more accurate rainfall estimates than any other system.

Here is what it looks like.

This is another exciting tool that actually predicts what the radar will look like in the future. It takes storm movement, atmospheric conditions, and past storm behavior into account and project the radar view up to 2 hours in the future. To make it easier for you to understand, we will be using a different colortable compared to our regular radar so you can differentiate between what is current and what is in the future. Here is what it looks like.

Finally, here is what one of our control panels looks like. This is what we see when we are using the radar.

The area enclosed in yellow is the output screen. Whatever appears there appears on your television screens at home. From the blue box we are able to choose which product we want to appear on-air, whether it is EchoPATH, RainVision, or StormVision 3D Radar. We have about 18 tools to choose from which are in the green box. These include our telestration tools, street naming feature, storm track, among others. Within the red box is the graph/table section where we can track the attributes of individual storms. (You can see an example of this earlier in the post). The choices in the purple box allow us to control the look of everything you see on screen whether it is radar colors, storm track colors, text size and color, etc.

We are constantly looking for ways to make our weather coverage easier to understand. If you have any suggestions or comments please leave us a comment. If you have any questions regarding StormVision 3D Radar leave those as well and we'll get to those throughout the day. We'll be working over the next month or so to make some of these products available on-line. Once we get those up and running we will let you know!

We'll be debuting the products on-air tonight with Chief Meteorologist Kevin Lighty on KSPR News at 4:30, 5:30, and at 10. Be sure to watch.

The KSPR StormVision Weather Team