National Weather Service radar down for maintenance, won't affect forecasting abilities

The Northern Indiana office of the National Weather Service has taken their radar offline for two weeks for major upgrades that will keep it in service for as long as possible. Even though the local radar is down, weather forecasting will continue.

Michael Lewis, the warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Northern Indiana says the radar will be down for 2 weeks.

“The National Weather Service WSR-88D Doppler radar is going to be down for a 2-week period as we go through a refurbishment of the pedestal," Lewis said. “There’s things we can do to maintain it, but when you start looking at 20 plus years of continuous use, we’re starting to see more and more potential for failure and we just don’t need that.”

This upgrade to the radar is just one part of the service life extension program which helps to extend the life of the radar for another 20 to 25 years.

Even though the radar will be offline for that time, forecasting will still continue business as usual.

“The radar being down for a 2-week period is not something to worry about," Lewis said. “We will still warn, we will still operate.”

Even though the radar in northern Indiana will be down, nearby radar sites also cover our area.

“You will not have data from here because the radar will be down, but there’s radar data from all the surrounding offices that you need to pull from," Lewis said.

Here in Michiana, there are multiple different radar sites to look to in all directions to get an idea of what’s going on in the atmosphere, even with our local radar down.

“The radar from our office is centralized here and we use it as meteorologists, we use it, but we also depend on the other radars nearby," Lewis said. "We’re looking at Grand Rapids, we’re looking over to Chicago to see what’s going on to our west. If storms are to the south, we may pick and look at Central Illinois or Indianapolis or Willington, Ohio, we may look at their radars just to give us a better idea of what’s going on throughout the atmosphere.”