Here we go again!
Meteorology expert, trained RF-remote sensing and climatologist Richard Hoagland has found evidence that hurricane Katrina is indeed an artificial hyper-dimensional storm that was hurled into the midsection of the US like a large soggy baseball into a fat man’s stomach.
Not being a meteorologist or a climatologist myself but having something of a background in RF remote sensing, I found myself puzzled at how a highly trained well credentialed person like Mr. Hoagland could come up with such a strange conclusion.
To me, Hoagland is beginning to sound like this gentleman.
Although to be fair, Hoagland is a much better writer.
Meet Doug Pooley. I reviewed his Flash Radar webpage on the Odd Empire some years ago. Pooley is very sincere in his beliefs, he’s written a web page all about radar rings and strange stuff he’s gotten off of weather radar sites.
Combining bible prophesies and end of the world paranoia, Pooley believes the literal truth of the Savior’s return and that evil radar rings are proof that someone is beaming rays into our heads from secret government facilities like the HARP research station in Alaska.
I noticed that Hoagland’s web page resembles Pooley in a number of ways. Hoagland’s page is black with white text, Pooley’s page is black with white text. Hoagland’s page has a few animated gif files, Pooley’s page has more than a few. Pooley often writes in ALL CAPS, Hoagland often does this. Hoagland’s page makes strange accusations against various government agencies. Pooley’s page does the same.
More importantly, both page authors make some very erroneous assumptions about what we are seeing when we look at weather radar pages.
“How can you say that!?” The critics shout, Hoagland wrote The Monuments of Mars he was right about that so surely he knows what he’s talking about!
Actually, no he doesn’t. In fact, Mr. Hoagland apparently has no idea what he’s talking about regarding RF remote sensing. Maybe about lots of other things but let us stick to the subject.
Hoagland’s contention is that storms like Katrina don’t occur naturally, they must be artificial man made storms that are steered into their targets via secret government weather modification projects. Your US tax dollars spent on to secret black op programs to send huge killer hurricanes into US cities.
That sounds logical right?
He’s been writing long diatribes to that effect on his web log people are taking him seriously.
Hoagland thinks that Radar PPI displays actually show weather, they do not. Radar displays an analog of radio echoes by placing a dot on a display corresponding the echo’s direction and range from the radar receiver. These are radio impulses bounced off some distant chunk of matter. Droplets of water in the case of weather radar. They can show outlines of clouds and rain itself depending on how they are configured. They can also show lots of other stuff that has little to do with the weather. Stuff that often fools laypeople like Mr. Pooley and unfortunately; Mr. Hoagland as well.
For example, from Mr. Hoaglan’s own weblog.
“It is the hope of those of us at Enterprise who have quietly pursued this research since 1998, as well as these dedicated specialists in this almost unknown field cited above, that by posting the truly bizarre “vortex radar anomaly” captured by the NEXRAD network over New Orleans on the evening of August 17th, 2005, someone “in the know” will be further inspired to release MORE crucial data of this type.
One thing seems clear, even at this early stage of our investigation:
Whatever formed this extraordinary radar signature, captured by the NEXRAD network on the 17th, cannot be considered, by any means, a “natural meteorological phenomenon.” Nature does NOT create — and in totally clear air — a set of slowly rotating “ionized vortices” … capable of reflecting radar energy across literally hundreds of miles”
OK, for those of you who think Hoagland’s some kind of demigod, and the Odd Emperor is just a freaking idiot, (and I know who you are!) Just skip the following paragraphs because they go into some technical aspects of radar. I (um) kind of doubt you would be interested in any case.
What Hoagland said is pure nonsense; radar is not a magical instrument. One that uses mystic rays to give the weather guys perfect images of storms from hundreds of miles away. Radar does not detect “vortex anomalies or any of that Star Trek crap because, frankly Scarlet; we don’t know what a “vortex anomaly is. How the duce can we detect something before we understand the nature of it?
Radar is simply a suite of man made-tools and like anything that humans make, it’s not perfect. Radar, very simply sends out a high frequency radio wave, waves that tend to be reflected by solid matter, suspended liquids or even gasses.
When we see a radar map of the US we are seeing a composite, or many smaller pictures all combined into one. Most cities in the US have one or more weather radar stations which contribute to the overall picture. Radar signals cannot cover an area like the United States. Radar waves tend to travel in straight lines and so, because of the curvature of the Earth a radar signal can only work a few dozen miles from it’s transmitter.
He is correct about one thing, “a set of slowly rotating “ionized vortices” is not a natural phenomenon, because there is no such thing. Or at least, no such thing has ever (to my knowledge) ever been detected by radar. What Hoagland is misidentifying is just unfiltered RF noise.
In fact, most of the stuff we see on a weather radar display is filtered, the clutter, noise and interference is washed out so that we only see the interesting stuff.
Here’s the kicker; all of these radar sets are attenuated and filtered to one extent or another . The PPI display (that’s the round picture with a sweep that radiates out from the center, “plan-position indicator) is like an old TV set with brightness and contrast knobs. Today these are computer algorithms but the concept is the same. Someone manually adjusts the attenuation or the sensitivity of the radar set to compensate for changing atmospheric conditions.
Radar can reflect off of anything, even air molecules so the set receivers must be attenuated so that the PPI is not simply a round bright mass on the screen. You can think of this as turning down a too loud stereo so that you can hear music better, radar displays are full of clutter and noise interference and all kinds of other crap. This unwanted data is rejected by attenuation or clever computer algorithm so that the weather guys (and us at home) can see storms magically appear on our screens. In fact we never see raw data, it would be like trying to pick out Beethoven’s ninth symphony at a biker convention. All the noise and other junk would clutter up the PPI display making it look like a bright disk or a ring.
Radar is also susceptible to interference too, just like any radio receiver. This is noise that might come from outside the radar or from any number of other sources. Even from the transmitter itself if it’s not shielded properly (a big problem for people who maintain radar sets.)
Aircraft, other weather radars, bounce-signals off of buildings, even microwave ovens can generate bogus returns.
The bands that Hoagland is citing as proof look suspiciously like accidental jamming to me. Perhaps another radar transmitter operating at nearly the same frequency. Perhaps it’s a reflection, a chunk of aluminum hanging from a building or even in a tree. These things can play hob with a radar set.
But please don’t take my word for it, I only have some training and experience to go by. Provided by the self-same US government that Hoagland thinks is screwing around with these storms. Who are you going to believe? (Yeh, that fellow who wrote the nutty books, right ! I got you covered!)
Echoes from surface targets appear in almost all radar reflectivity images. In the immediate area of the radar, “ground clutter” generally appears within a radius of 20 nm. This appears as a roughly circular region with echoes that show little spatial continuity. It results from radio energy reflected back to the radar from outside the central radar beam, from the earth’s surface or buildings.
Under highly stable atmospheric conditions (typically on calm, clear nights), the radar beam can be refracted almost directly into the ground at some distance from the radar, resulting in an area of intense-looking echoes. This “anomalous propagation” phenomenon (commonly known as AP) is much less common than ground clutter. Certain sites situated at low elevations on coastlines regularly detect “sea return”, a phenomenon similar to ground clutter except that the echoes come from ocean waves.
href=”http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Atmosphere/tornado/weather_radar.html”>”>Or this
And this is kind of interesting
The bottom line is, those traces are not evidence of strange multidimensional rays, steering and amplifying hurricane Katrina, they are evidence that Mr. Hoagland is not the radar and meteorological expert that he thinks he is. He might not know what he’s talking about in other areas too but, lets leave that to other people, other times and places.
hmm