Strange radar return....

It's the infrared 'glow' that happens when Alabama is playing football. You know, all that awesomeness can't be contained. :D :D
 
Can't see what you intended to show us. I often see a ground clutter return around the radar station on that website when there are no actual returns (in my case, Ft. Smith, AR). I think it is the result of an automatic gain control that starts cranking up the sensitivity of the radar when it doesn't see anything. This is purely a guess on my part.
 
Since it wasn't a screen shot, hard to say.

A lot of evenings this time of year you will get light blue returns in our area like that. There was a good sum of humidity around, with little showers while we were out on the motorcycles. Wouldn't surprise me if it was remnants from that. On more than one occasion flying at night on a perfectly clear evening with not a cloud in the sky, ATC would report light precip ahead, and ask if it was real or an anomaly. It was invariably an anomaly.

Edit: However, the hills around here do produce a lot of weather like that where precip will seem to develop from one source, and just grow from there. Usually I observe that on days with much more precip, though.
 
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I think it comes at night because they leave it on, in a hi sens mode at night?

What is Ground Clutter?

Echoes from surface targets appear in almost all radar images. In the immediate area of the radar, "ground clutter" generally appears within a radius of about 25 miles. This appears as a roughly circular region with echoes that show little spatial continuity and appear nearly stationary. It results from radio energy being reflected back to the radar from outside the central radar beam, from the earth's surface or buildings.

Ground clutter around radar KDTX When in clear air mode (when the radar is in its most sensitive state), the radar may detect echoes from targets on or near the ground. Such targets could include buildings, hills, waves on large bodies of water, migrating birds, swarms of bats and even insects.

Under highly stable atmospheric conditions (typically on calm, clear nights), the radar beam can be refracted (bent) almost directly into the ground at some distance from the radar, resulting in an area of intense-looking echoes. This anomalous propagation phenomenon (commonly known as AP) is much less common than ground clutter. Certain sites situated at low elevations on coastlines regularly detect sea return, a phenomenon similar to ground clutter except that the echoes come from ocean waves.
 

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As a side-note, going to the NOAA site and selecting higher altitudes/angles from the RADAR imagery and avoiding the composite image, can be an effective way to figure out if the big blob on the composite image truly is ground clutter.

Around here, the composite image from KFTG will clearly show the outline of the Rocky Mountains to the West at low altitude/angles year 'round but especially when they're covered with snow.

Sometimes there's orographic lifting from the West and there's really precip at the Continental Divide. Sometimes it's just the RADAR "knife-edging" at the mountains.
 
Weather radar in Houston and Austin picked up smoke plumes from our big fire in Bastrop just like NYC did from WTC after 9/11/01
 
I usually look at the sat pic and the metar to see if there is correlation or not.
 
dmccormack said:
Sat wasn't usable -- this was after sunset.
Click to expand...

You can always use IR sat, which is my preference as it isn't impacted by the silly ball of fusion. :)
 
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