WRAL.com: Raleigh, Durham, Fayetteville

The most direct way to find your question is to search for the name you used when you submitted it (first name, last name or both). If you did not include a name, then you can search using keywords from your question. Of course, since many weather-related terms are common to a lot of the questions we receive, this may turn up a number of others in addition to your own.

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Answer: It's unclear whether the app you were looking at indicated a mesocyclone based on the detection alogorithm utilized by the National Weather Service in its NEXRAD radar network, but a version of that algortithm was found in a 2005 study to result in tornadoes for about 30% of mesocyclone detections overall. The algorithm was updated a few years later and appears likely to now identify and highlight some smaller and weaker mesocyclones than the older version. We were unable to find documentation as to whether this may have reduced that percentage, but that may be a reasonable supposition. In any event, detection of a mesocyclone may also indicate a storm organization strong enough to produce damaging downburst winds or large hail even if no tornado forms, so it's worth paying attention to a storm that generates a radar detection of that sort. However, it is also possible that the mesoscale detection itself is in error, or that a noisy velocity signature leads to some transient detections that do not show consistency over time or vertically, in which case they may be less likely to signal a high chance of severe weather, and therefore less likely to trigger a warning by the National Weather Service.
Jun. 11, 2013 | Tags: maps & codes, severe weather, weather radar

Answer: While there is a Buckhorn in Orange County that is a crossroads community just south of I-40 a littl west of Hillsborough and Efland, the Buckhorn referred to on the temperature map is a weather station in the vicinity of the northwestern end of Buckhorn Lake/Reservoir, which covers parts of western Wilson and northeastern Johnston County (where the station itself resides).
May. 6, 2013 | Tags: instruments, maps & codes

Answer: It's unlikely we'll be able to show both units on maps or graphics as they would become rather busy and cluttered. We do, however, provide an option to display some of the readings on our site in metric units. To toggle this setting on, just go to the "Current Conditions" page and you'll see a link to "Use metric units" under the report from the WRAL studios. This will change the text units displayed on the current conditions page to metric, and this will remain the case each time you visit the site unless you return to the current conditions page and click "Use English units" instead. Note that this change only applies to the current conditions page, and doesn't affect graphic images like the 7-day forecast or temperature maps, which are only rendered and displayed in English units.
Apr. 10, 2013 | Tags: maps & codes, wral.com

Answer: The only weather-related names that we are aware of that are subject to official rules and managed by government agencies charged with weather forecast and warning responsibilities are those for tropical cyclones. Of course, Sandy is an example of such a storm and the name was applied to that storm by the National Hurricane Center, taken from a list of Atlantic Basin names that is compiled and managed by a subcommittee of the World Meteorological Organization. The list includes includes six years worth of names at any time, and those names are re-used every six years unless a storm produces a level of destruction and/or loss of life that would make such re-use insensitive to those who suffered the consequences. In that case, the name is retired from the list and another name starting with the same letter and having the same gender is chosen to take its place. We can be certain that Sandy will be retired from that list and never used again as the name for a tropical cyclone in the Atlantic basin.

The same kind of rules do not necessarily apply to unofficial or informal names that arise by way of social media, journalism, private businesses or popular use.

Apr. 9, 2013 | Tags: Floyd, hurricanes, maps & codes

Answer: Range comes up pretty frequently in the form of letting people know the specific or general location of weather features, whether they are large ones like low pressure centers or the eye of a hurricane, or much smaller ones such an approaching rain shower or thunderstorm. Usually, range is combined with direction, or bearing, to provide a relative location, for example, we might point out a thunderstorm that is "6 miles (range) southwest (direction) of Clayton, moving northeast at 25 miles per hour." Or, we may note that the "center of Hurricane Irene is 128 miles (range) south-southeast (direction) of Wilmington," for example. In addition, our weather radar systems use range and direction information to plot the location of each pixel of information collected from the sweeping beam, in order to form the maps that show location and intensity of precipitation. Applying range and bearing to show locations is also known as using "polar coordinates."
Apr. 2, 2013 | Tags: maps & codes, weather radar

Answer: If we're interpreting your question correctly, you're referring to the numbers in white that are located in the black potion of the "tubes" on the 7-day graphic. Those are the expected low temperatures. They are offset a bit to the left on the tube compared to the location of the high temperature above, in order to give the sense of timing involved. On a typical day, the minimum temperature will occur around sunrise or within an hour or so afterward, followed by the highest temperature during the mid-afternoon hours.
Mar. 28, 2013 | Tags: maps & codes, wral.com

Answer: It turns out that more countries do not use DST than the other way around. Most "Western" nations in the northern hemisphere do apply the time shift, but overall a quick rough count shows about 77 countries or territories use a form of Daylight Saving Time, while about 168 do not. There are quite a few countries that have used it at some point in the past and no longer do, including Russia, China and a sizable portion of Central and South America. The Falkland Islands shifted to year-round DST starting in 2011.
Mar. 22, 2013 | Tags: maps & codes

Answer: It's probably most accurate to say that we use a combination of models, some of which are also used by our weather service counterparts and some of which are not, so there's a notable overlap but not an exact duplication. As you noted, some years ago we entered into a cooperative project with NC State University, the State Climate Office and the NC Supercomputing Center to adapt and optimize a computer model called MM5, originally developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Penn State University, for application over our part of the country. We called the resulting model, which we ran in both a high-resolution version covering the central and eastern U.S., and a lower resolution version extending well into the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, "NC WeatherScope" for on-air use. That modeling system is still among those we use on-air and behind the scenes, but we also have the ability to show on-air versions of several other proprietary medium to high resolution models (known variously as ADONIS, VividCast, MicroCast, RPM, etc) and can also display output from National Weather Service models and modeling systems such as the NAM, GFS and SREF, along with occasional views of output from the ECMWF ("European" model). So as not to have a laundry list of labels to apply to the different views, we simply label output from any of the models we'd like to show according to the output presented (precipitation, clouds & rain, potential snow accumulation, upper flow & rotation, etc) and generically call any of those "FutureCast."
Mar. 7, 2013 | Tags: maps & codes

Answer: We can't be quite certain which temperature you are referring to on our web site or what station you have set to show up for temperature on your Desktop Weather application. In general, though, the temperature shown in the upper right corner of our web site is from a sensor here at the TV station and is updated almost real-time, whereas temperatures from airport weather stations are updated once per hour (for sites with ASOS stations like RDU) or once every twenty minutes (for sites with AWOS stations, as a number of smaller airports in the area use). These differnces in update times can lead to differences in the numbers. Of course, it is also possible that there are notable differences in actual temperatures between one location and another, and that would likewise be reflected in the readings posted on the web site and shown in a Desktop App.
Mar. 2, 2013 | Tags: instruments, maps & codes, wral.com

Answer: We don't have much to go on regarding what information you'd like to have for your investigation, but you might find it helpful to look over the records page for that date that you can access through our "Almanac" page - a direct address for the information is www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KRDU/1984/12/7/DailyHistory.html. If it would help to have the information in the larger context of a weather map for that date or surrounding ones, you can retrieve such historical maps from the NOAA Central Library at docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/dwm/data_rescue_daily_weather_maps.html. Good luck!
Feb. 27, 2013 | Tags: maps & codes, past weather