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Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Prescott Campus now has a weather radar on the roof of our Academic Complex! The RDR-7000 aircraft radar was recently gifted to us by Honeywell and installed on a tower atop the roof, including a new aluminum base and new plastic radome (designed by Joseph Chandler, Engineering Lab Specialist, and Jacob Homberger, his student assistant). The radar has a 24-inch slotted antenna, which gives it a beamwidth of about 4 degrees.
Photo courtesy of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
It is the tallest object on the ERAU campus, which allows us to obtain good surveillance scans of precipitation echoes around central Yavapai County. The radar performs an automatic volume scan of a 120-degree sector, the center of which we can orient in any direction. We generally point the radar to the north-northeast of campus, towards the airport in support of the ERAU Flight Department.
Here are photos of the radar before it was hoisted to a height of ~30′ above the roof. A weather cam is mounted to the underside of the radar baseplate, taking visible images of the cloud patterns, aiding interpretation of the radar imagery.
Photo courtesy of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
To view the radar and webcam images, go to and scroll down. This site is still under construction, and the radar and webcam image loops are not yet displaying automatically. To view the radar and cam loops, one needs to right click on the link and select “save link as…”, save the file, and then view it using a suitable MP4 file viewer.
I would like to thank Honeywell for the gift they have given to us, along with former College of Aviation Dean Jennah Perry, philanthropist Rudy Miller and alumnus Marc Collins, for providing the radar to us. Thanks also to Brad Sinn, Pawel Witusik, and their crew at ERAU Facilities for the expert installation of the radar tower, and student assistants Sawyer Curless and Ally Allman who helped with the radar wiring, testing, and software development to view the imagery.
We also continue working to make machine-learning based thunderstorm forecasts available via the same website for our campus community and the general public to utilize during the summer monsoon.
Read more stories from Education on Signals A Z.com.
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