Despite this ongoing drought, exciting times in the News 3 Pinpoint Weather Center.  If you tuned in to News 3 at 6pm Thursday evening, you may have noticed a new addition to the way we brought the weather to you. A brand new, out of the box HD Pinpoint Radar. 

With this new asset, we can bring you storm and severe weather coverage like never before, here in the Brazos Valley.  This new technology will allow us to go inside of storms and literally pick out where large hail is falling, find where there may be strong rotation and even detect when there is a good chance that a tornado may be forming within a severe thunderstorm.  Not mention, the capability to predict where rain, hail and lightning will be moving over the next hour with more accuracy than ever before.  Speaking of lighting, this new radar is accurate enough to determine the cross streets where the last cloud-to-ground lightning strike hit anywhere in the Brazos Valley -- and those features together are only scratching the surface on what this new system can do.

When severe weather really rumbles through, we now have the capability to slice through a storm in order to look at it's structure all the way from the ground to the top of the storm. What does that mean? Basically we can dissect a storm, analyze it's structure and determine just how severe it may be. 

So for now we hope and pray for much needed rain in the Brazos Valley -- and when that rain finally returns, The PinPoint Weather Team has one more tool to make sure we keep you and your family safe.

 --Meteorologist Shel Winkley

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