Researchers at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory are using non-weather data from the nationwide weather radar network to understand how to track non-meteorological events moving through the air for better emergency response. Weather reports on the news show colorful, near-time representations of clouds and precipitation moving over an area. A network of Doppler radars distributed across the country sends energy pulses into the air to provide information that can be interpreted by algorithms, delivering critical information about rain, sleet and other types of weather. Among the information gathered from the radar pulses is data that is typically filtered out but could be valuable for non-weather research, such as tracking items moving through the air, like smoke, ash or debris.
"Precipitation shows up as spheres on a Doppler radar," said Erik Kabela, a meteorologist supporting national security sciences at ORNL. "In the dataset, spheres have a value of one. Anything else detected by the radar in the air shows up as an elongated item and has a value of less than one. In this way, we can remove the precipitation entries, those coded as one and use the remaining data to see what was in the air, what direction it went, and what happened to it as it traveled over a distance."
Kabela and his team looked at news events over the past decades to identify date, time and location of non-weather events that caused debris to rise into the air. Among the events they selected were the BP oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the SpaceX Starship explosion in Texas, and the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing.
Going back in time to see how this data showed up on radars, the ORNL team graphed debris rising into the air and moving over a distance. The results were published in the Journal of Emergency Management .
Kabela is interested in adapting the outcome of this research for emergency responders. "Non-weather data could tip off authorities before other types of indications are used. For responders already in the field, this data could tell them where a debris cloud is moving and provide indications of safe places to set up their operating station."
Mike Benson, an ORNL mechanical engineer supporting nuclear nonproliferation, said weather - something people typically check daily - provides a readily available dataset for other uses. "A tremendous resource exists with data that was filtered out for the intended purpose but actually is really useful for other applications. It's a network capability in our country that's well distributed."
Benson said the next step is to develop a machine learning algorithm to automatically detect a cloud of debris and notify a person in real-time. "The algorithm could detect emergency events in rural areas that haven't been noticed yet by a person. The earlier an event can be detected, the faster services are deployed to mitigate impacts," he said.
Another use for this data is to aid in nuclear forensics investigations, a project ORNL's David Hooper has spent the last 15 years supporting. "If an investigation were to happen, technicians would go into the field to collect samples," said Hooper, an incident modeling and computation engineer. "Weather radars could detect a plume to tell us how much debris is in the air and where it's moving. This would help with tracking the data and providing safer information for the field technicians."
Hooper's team develops software with fallout modeling details specific to the U.S. government's needs. Radar data can improve the model used to predict the impacts of fallout. During a forensics situation, the radar data would track a rising cloud and give better estimates of where the winds are carrying it, how sheer layers are affecting the cloud and possibly tracking the debris as it is coming down to the ground. "This would mean dealing less with a predictive model and more with a physical measurement, which for mission planning is always preferable," Hooper said.
This project was funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science . - Liz Neunsinger
