1995
Automated Storm Tracking

While there is, and should be, a very close relationship between the National Weather Service and the broadcaster, responsibilities for the two are not the same. Broadcasters provide an important conduit between the National Weather Service and the general public, while the NWS is the official source of warnings. We operate under the idea that the broadcaster's role should be to supplement the NWS by anticipating dangerous situations and providing detailed advance information so that viewers are prepared to respond once a warning is issued. And there are a myriad of events which affect people's safety that would go unalerted, unless the broadcaster is on the air with anticipatory information.  For instance, there is no such thing as a lightning warning, yet more people are killed each year from lightning than from tornadoes.

It was all live radar in the days before Nexrad and in an effort to automate the "direction and speed" of storms, we developed a process to create a manual storm track, then come back at some time in the future, say 5 minutes, and update the center of threat.  The system would measure the distance between the 2 points, note the time between storm tracks and then automatically redefine the direction and speed parameters.   This first attempt at automating a storm track was also the basis for our first patent.

We started saving radar sweeps in memory and developed another process where one could click on a current threat, backtrack a few sweeps,  click on where the threat had been and the system would move back to present time and create an automated storm track with the computed direction and speed parameters.  That was our second patent.