Sirius XM NEXRAD Outages on Sat. 2/9/19?

[Jeff_S]

Hello all.  I'm aiming this mostly at Florida folks, but any others in the Southeast may have had a similar experience. While flying from Amelia Island down to Ft. Pierce for the Florida Mooney monthly lunch (great fun, by the way...good to see all my Mooney compadres) we had some slight bit of weather around the central coast area.  We were in an out of clouds, but the XM NEXRAD on my panel wasn't painting any precipitation so I wasn't paying much attention.  Then all of a sudden we flew into some actual showers, hard enough that I thought they should have showed up on NEXRAD.

Sure enough, when I pulled up the ADS-B NEXRAD on my iPad there was a small band of showers that we just flew through.

On the way back north, that same line had progressed a bit farther south and ATC actually called them out: "light to moderate precipitation on your line of flight, 5 miles wide, deviations left or right approved as needed." And yet, still nothing on the XM NEXRAD but that band of showers showed up on ADS-B.  We zoomed the NEXRAD range all the way out to 1000 miles, and it did show some shower activity up in the Northeast but nothing at all in the Southeast. And the legend was showing NEXRAD as being updated on its regular schedule.

So, did anybody else notice any "coverage holes" in NEXRAD in the Florida area (or anywhere else) on Saturday?  Just curious...

Jeff

[buddy]

I had the same thing only it was around 10 AM departing VRB to Spruce Creek 7FL6, nothing on the XM NEXRAD but my ADS-B picked up light showers north of VRB. I was thinking maybe the showers were to light and the XM NEXRAD wasn’t picking it up but I guess I was wrong.

[carusoam]

See if we can invite our weather MSer to the conversation... @scottd

Scott May have some insight on the XM broadcast challenges...

Best regards,

-a-

[Scott Dennstaedt, PhD]

6 hours ago, carusoam said:

See if we can invite our weather MSer to the conversation... @scottd

Scott May have some insight on the XM broadcast challenges...

I can't be sure without doing some detailed investigation and getting TWC (formally WSI) involved to find out.  However, it smells like an issue that isn't all that common, but not all that rare.  I discuss this here in my new AvWxTraining blog (feel free to join my blog - its free and you'll get notified of new posts). Also if you are an AvWxWorkshops/WeatherSpork member, I discuss this issue also in one of my bite-sized member workshops here.  

[LANCECASPER]

This is another good reason for those with perfectly good working stormscopes not to remove them during panel "upgrades". It could have easily have been an ADS-B outage as well. Having a stormscope on-board is just one more tool in the toolbox.

[Jeff_S]

Thanks Scott. That blog I think explains it, as well as confirms some suspicions I've had for awhile about mysterious lack of returns.  The weather forecast for the whole day was for negligible precipitation and no convective activity, so it seems reasonable that the human-element may have set this filter and then not turned it off when showers started to develop.

 

[Scott Dennstaedt, PhD]

On 2/14/2019 at 4:14 PM, Jeff_S said:

Thanks Scott. That blog I think explains it, as well as confirms some suspicions I've had for awhile about mysterious lack of returns.  The weather forecast for the whole day was for negligible precipitation and no convective activity, so it seems reasonable that the human-element may have set this filter and then not turned it off when showers started to develop.

 

Jeff,

The part that is a shame is that they filter the mosaic.  I'd personally rather see an unfiltered depiction.  Yes, it will have ground clutter and anomalous propagation on it, but it'll also show you the location of gust fronts and outflow boundaries that are currently filtered out.    And it won't miss these events.