El Salvador has eight LAWR (Local Area Weather Radar) weather radars, which are located in Santa Ana; San Salvador; Zacatecoluca; Puerto Parada, in Usulutan; San Miguel; Victoria City, in Cabañas; La Laguna, and Sonsonate. They are installed in government buildings and placed in their own infrastructures, such as the one in Ciudad Victoria.
These radars record the intensity and displacement of weather phenomena such as rainfall, tropical storms, tropical depressions, and hurricanes. In addition, they generate images of these phenomena every five minutes, which are received and compiled by a server and uploaded to the website of the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources (MARN). They can be consulted by the entire population.
Since the end of 2022 and in the first months of 2023, these MARN radars have been modernized and improved with the aim of having more precision of the images, more speed and data reception capacity.a
According to Edwin Santiago Escobar, coordinator of the Engineering and Maintenance Unit of the MARN Observatory, the modernization was necessary, since the old computers had Windows 98, the images froze, the “software” showed constant failures, and they did not have support from the Institute. Hydraulic of Denmark, which was the original producer of this type of radar, but ended production.
The main changes have been made to the processor, monitors and keyboards. They also have more powerful computers and the old “software”, which was for a PCI card, was replaced by a version with more capabilities.
«With the modernization that has been done, we have a more user-friendly “software”, the computers have Windows 11 and with this “software” we no longer have the problem of the image freezing. Now the colors are more vivid and it gives us a better definition of the storm. This change was worth it because we have extended the useful life of the radars,” Escobar explained.
The meteorological radar makes “sweeps”, which refers to the fact that its antenna launches electromagnetic particles into space, which, when colliding with something, return to the place of origin, and there the radar captures information about the meteorological phenomenon, such as the distance , speed, among other data. The range diameter of each radar is approximately 120 kilometers, and the eight pieces of equipment cover the entire national territory.
In Central America there are no radars similar to those in El Salvador, there are only three in South America; in Europe there are five, located in Denmark, Germany and Poland; therefore, the country is leading in this type of meteorological technology in favor of the population. “Only we have it and for us it has been very useful for early warning, because it allows us to know how the rains enter the Pacific,” Escobar said.