Meteorologists excited to close Charlotte’s radar gap with newly passed House bill
CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — There’s good news for Charlotte meteorologists fighting to improve weather warnings in the region.
Their goal is to prevent scenes like the one last month in Mount Ulla, where a tornado touched down, but it was not detected by radar, meaning people in that area did not get any warning of a twister.
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“We’re a major city. There’s a lot of people that live here, and we’re the only one in the whole country that doesn’t have a radar that’s in our own backyard,” said Queen City News meteorologist Jim Lytle. “That’s going to make all the difference in the world for the accuracy of the forecast, for the type of precipitation that’s going to come.”
The bill – co-sponsored by three North Carolina members of Congress — is called the Weather Act Reauthorization. Currently, the closest National Weather Service Doppler radar system is more than 80 miles away near Greenville, South Carolina.
House Bill 6073 would have weather authorities prioritize current radar gaps when deciding where to place the new systems. It passed in the House on April 30.
Queen City News Chief meteorologist Tara Lane says it would help when predicting weather events like the EF-1 tornado that hit western Rowan County in April. Mount Ulla Elementary School was damaged to the point of closing the next day.
“It could have helped that particular thunderstorm,” Lane said. “There was a Severe Thunderstorm Warning with the tornado-possible wording within that warning, but there wasn’t an official Tornado Warning at the time. So, again, having a radar to fill that gap could allow the National Weather Service to see a little more of that detail and possibly could have issued that Tornado Warning on that storm.”
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