User blog:MatthewBerfield/NBCU to roll out new mobile radar trucks for its O&O stations this week

On August 4, 2016, NBC Owned Television Stations COO Matthew Berfield announced in a press conference that NBCUniversal would be forming an exclusive partnership with weather radar company, Enterprise Electronics Corporation or EEC and weather software company, WSI to help produce and roll out a fleet of storm tracking and mobile radar trucks that will serve its O&O's and their respective DMA's. "This is absolutely great timing," COO Matthew Berfield said. "With the Olympics kicking off this week, I don't think we could've chosen a better time to release this." The radars, dubbed "StormRanger" for NBC, TNT, and Hyper affiliates (or "CazaTormentas" for Telemundo affiliates, will be equipped with an X-Band, dual polarization doppler dish, which will be used to differentiate between different types of precip, such as rain, hail, snow, wet snow, dry snow, graupel, heavy rain, big drops, ice crystals and even non-meteorological matter such as biological matter, tornado debris, and smoke. "Normal radar sends out 1 beam to detect precipitation and wind velocities, while that's good, it can't detect some of the things that our radars will be able to. Plus-normal radar, such as NEXRAD data, takes as much as 5-6 minutes to get critical, life saving information back to the station and to the public. With our new radars, we can send out a beam and get the data back instantaneously in about a minute, which is crucial during severe weather when seconds count." The first StormRanger vehicle was unveiled on Monday at NBC O&O, KTAK in Dallas. "By the end of the month, I'm hoping we can get these unveiled and rolling on the road at our NBC O&O's in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington and San Diego. By the end of the year, we should have these trucks roaming the roads in cities like Houston, Phoenix, Miami, Denver, Amarillo and Kansas City, which are big severe weather markets." Viewers can also access the data that these radars are receiving through the station's weather app. "Weather is a station's #1 priority. I'm very thankful that I am a part of this project, knowing that we will be saving lives with this type of weather radar."