Our Logo
What IS that in your logo? A question we've been posed.
Our logo is a visualization of a polarimetric (dual-pol) wave! WHOA, what does THAT mean?
We're glad you asked...electromagnetic waves (the light you see every day is an example) can propagate through space with a preferred orientation. However, natural light tends to have no such preferred orientation as it travels. For a radar, this can be controlled. The radar can emit, or transmit, the wave so that the wave oscillations are horizontal, vertical, other directions, or can even continually change their orientation (for special cases like circular polarization). We refer to the orientation of this wave as its polarization. In the case of a polarimetric radar, the radar is actually transmitting waves with two different polarizations.
When we refer to a polarimetric radar, we're comparing information from the radar's different polarizations. For the sake of NEXRAD, the United States' weather radar network, these are waves that are horizontally polarized, and waves that are vertically polarized. With this additional information, we, as radar meteorologists, are able to discern the shapes of things that the waves pass through. This gives us insights into the microphysics of storms, and a chance to better determine if a storm is just rain, has hail, or if it has other hazards that could affect life or property.