SPC Wind Profiler Image Display Example

Balloon soundings usually go up only every 12 hours, or twice a day. It is very important to severe weather forecasting to know what the upper level winds are doing, much more often than that. Hourly upper air winds are available to SPC forecasters through displays of radar-derived winds. The winds illustrated at left are detected by a network of wind profilers -- Doppler radars with stationary antennae, pointed straight upward. We also see winds from WSR-88D radars.