Radar Ducting Catches Chesapeake Bridge

Mar 15, 2012; 1:29 PM ET

There was a great example this morning (hat tip: Derek Wanner) of NEXRAD Radar “Ducting” (which I have blogged about before) in the southern Chesapeake Bay, and I used three different AccuWeather.com radar products to explore it. A quick check of MapSpace confirmed the strong signatures where the radar beam bounced down from the atmosphere and hit the land:

Then, using our Bing Interactive Radar, I realized that not only did the anomalous propagation trace the contour of the land, it even traced the outline of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, an engineering wonder that I visited in 2008.

I was hoping that the Velocity data from RadarPlus might show the speed of the cars, as the Chicago radar once did, but it generally interpreted the velocity of the bridge as zero (which is good for the vehicles driving on it).

For more examples, the science behind it, and other radar anomalies, read my blog entry “Anomalies: Radar Bloom, Ducting Explained.”