Doppler On Wheels Parks at Plymouth

On Mon., Feb. 17 the Doppler On Wheels (DOW), one of the most advanced pieces of weather detecting technology in the world had it's debut at Plymouth State University. The DOW was parked in front of the Hartman Union Building for the whole day so passers by could stop and learn about it themselves. The reason the impressive piece of machinery made an appearance at the University because of a National Science Foundation Center for Secere Weather Research grant application that was sent in by PSU's own Dr. Sam Miller. He said, "It's wonderful to get it here. It's going to be really useful to us because it's a great outreach tool to raise awareness with the public." Dr. Miller went on to say, "It's wonderful as an educational tool for teaching a variety of classes and it's great for research purposes."

Sophomore student Kyle Pellerin is taking Weather (MTDI 1100) and spoke about how his class time was spent observing the DOW on Monday. "So when I went to see the DOW, they showed us the inside of it and they had a few clips of tornados and hurricanes that had been captured by the truck. It had like ten computer monitors and the satellite data looked awesome because it was taken from the last storm that we got. Then they show us the tornado camera and tester thing that they run out and put 20 in a line or so, so that the things would get picked up and record data. The people were wicked cool and friendly too especially the man in the truck." 

The man in the truck turned out to be Plymouth State Senior Evan Delhay a Meteorology Major. He manned the DOW while it sat in front of the HUB and answered questions for people. Delhay got to take an adventure in the DOW for our last storm on the 13th. Delhay said, "Because it was a school night not many wanted to go. So I volunteered along with two other grad students as well as another undergrad and some met faculty. We had a meeting the Tuesday before the storm where we talked about the storm. Then on Thursday morning we had a big meeting about where we wanted to go, where would be the best place to view the storm and all those details. We discussed precisely what we wanted to look for." They ended up deciding on the airport in Rochester, NH. The group sat in the DOW for a few hours studying the storm and gathering different kinds of information. During their time in the storm the DOW was collecting data at a rate of 150 Gigabytes (GB) per hour. "That's an impressive number, we pulled in a lot of data during that storm," said Delhay. He went on to talk about what his experience that night in the DOW was like. He said, "I thought it was awesome. It wasn't like tornado chasing but it was still cool to drive into a storm and just be there observing the storm as it's happening and seeing the fine details that you normally don't see on the weather channel radar. This is really detailed stuff. It was so cool to see the stuff we've been learning about over the last few years come to fruition."

The Meteorology Department has put a lot of data together using the DOW and it is open to anyone who wants to check it out. The DOW will be in various locations in New Hampshire for the rest of the month. A schedule can be found on the Plymouth website.