Post-War Developments

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Post-war, radar technology only continued to develop, playing an integral role in science, commercial industries, and the military.

I. Technological Advancements

“At the end of the war, in winning and losing countries alike, it was time for a massive rethink about the direction which future research should take. There was clearly a need for a general resumption of civilian research... radar introduced some new and revolutionary concepts into warfare, and in doing so gave birth to entirely new branches of technology; it was inevitable that these would continue after the war and have a widespread impact on many aspects of civilian life.”

- Edward George "Taffy" Bowen in his book Radar Days, Welsh Physicist, assistant to Robert Watson-Watt

“New frontiers of the mind are before us, and if they are pioneered with the same vision, boldness and drive with which we have waged this war we can create a fuller and more fruitful employment and a fuller and more fruitful life.”

- Franklin D. Roosevelt to Dr. Vannevar Bush, November 17, 1944 (full letter right)

Letter from President Roosevelt to Dr. Vannevar Bush about spreading the information and research done during the war with the public post-war.

The equipment and its capabilities have exponentially improved since World War II, particularly once computers were invented and applied to radar.

“The observer, whether military operator or civil air traffic controller, is aided by 'labels' against each response on the radar screen to indicate the identity and height of aircraft, together with outline maps if features.... Computers provide backup to the operator in many ways, especially in modern GCI... [and] not all who see radar screens may realize the extent to which development engineering has led to such fine all-round performance.”

- Colin Latham and Anne Stobbs, radar instructor, and radar operator (respectively), in their book Radar: A Wartime Miracle

With clutter reductions and synthetic displays, the interpretation of incoming data is much more accurate and consistent.

Radar enabled the study of space, as it was mounted in satellites and space probes, allowing for data to be collected in unprecedented ways.

The wide range of frequencies for radars and their purposes.

Courtesy of the Planetary Society.

Above (both): Courtesy of Getty Images.

Leftover wartime radar equipment helped Bowen’s Australian colleagues study Centaurus A (NGC 5128), one of the first three radio sources identified with an optical object.

Courtesy of CSIRO/Robert Buderi.

Magellan was launched to map Venus on May 4, 1989.

Courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory/Robert Buderi.

Surface of the Planet Venus: The Magellan's probe's mapping radar captures western Eistla Regio, Gula mons volcano, and Cunitz crater on the surface of Venus.

Courtesy of Lee Corkan/Sygma via Getty Images.

As a technology that was rushed into production, radar has become more technologically capable, and is now used in various fields. What was once a top-secret technology became available for universal application and improvement.

“Radar technology was extremely secret because you didn't want to give the enemy an awareness that you even had this capability...[Later on,] because we won the war, we're [no longer] worried about it because the Germans had some, it's obviously some kind of science. You can't classify science because everybody's going to discover it anyways, so [we] declassify this.”

- Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

II. Air Traffic Control

“Up until [the 1940s] they were just filling flight plans and flying here and flying there, and we promised to stay at 2000 feet, you stay at 4000 feet, and hopefully we won't crash into each other because no one could really tell where anybody was...Then they invented this thing, it was initially called the CAA (Civil Aeronautics Administration) and then about middle 50s that then turned into the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration). And the FAA said 'Well, we like these radars, so now we're going to start populating all around the country...we took a military capability and civilianized it.”

- Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

“Ground based radars were developed for the control of aircraft along the air routes or in the airport control area. These were strictly analogous to wartime air-warning radars, giving the position of all aircraft within the jurisdiction of an airport... There is no doubt that, even in clear weather, present day landing rates would never have been achieved without the widespread use of such devices.”

- Edward George "Taffy" Bowen in his book Radar Days, Welsh Physicist, assistant to Robert Watson-Watt

Protection against bird strikes at BER Airport: 3D radar can detect flocks of birds at a distance of 15 kilometers around the airport. Pyrotechnic systems can then be triggered at the touch of a button to keep the birds away from the runways. The new radar system is supported by Wildlife Control Staff on the Ground.

Courtesy of Getty Images.

SSR radar aerial with a Fokker F-100 taxiing at dusk.

Courtesy of aviation-images.com/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

A NEXRAD Doppler weather radar station next to airport runway with mountains beyond.

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“Only... 15 years after the war is over with you got FAA all around the world, and all these airplanes flying and they're all coming into airports with radars that make sure that no one crashed into each other. So it's a tremendous civilian application of something that had originally started out as just a military thing.”

- Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

III. Commercial Use and Meteorology

Weather Radar - London Weather Centre - 1985: Adam Butler, left, Minister of State for Defense Procurement, officially opened the London weather radar at the London Weather Centre in High Holborn. Watching is Dr. John Houghston, Director- General of the Meteorological Office. From its elevated site in the Chilterns, the new Plessey radar has a clear view over London and can detect rain, hail, or snow.

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Cockpit radar showing thunderstorms up ahead.

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In commercial radar, meteorology is the most widespread application, typically employing a doppler weather radar, which collects data about the intensity the precipitation and identifies rotational weather patterns.

PORTALES, NM - MAY 9: Research meteorologist Karen Kosiba monitors a supercell thunderstorm in the Doppler on Wheels (DOW) vehicle during a tornado research mission, May 9, 2017 in Portales, New Mexico. Doppler on Wheels (DOW) is a mobile doppler radar mounted on a truck that brings instruments directly into storms, allowing scientists to scan storms and tornadoes and make 3-D maps of wind and debris.

Courtesy of Getty Images.

A mobile Doppler radar truck participating in Project Vortex 2 scans a previously tornadic storm in western Nebraska.

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Radar station, weather radar at night.

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“The weather satellites that look down and can watch the hurricanes...[stay] in geostationary orbit and [they watch] the hurricanes moving and you can get really good pictures of them...up at 33,000 miles, looking out.”

- Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

IV. Terrain Mapping

“The plane that they invented shortly after Desert Storm was called J Stars, and that airplane had a radar that looked down. And so that was a ground surveillance radar. ..and then they had a real lot of lessons learned trying to have radar bounce off the ground and then come back up, sort out all the returns that you are getting... But now you can kind of do some sort of analysis and you see rivers and you can see bridges and you can almost begin to take pictures with radar. That's called Synthetic Aperture Radars (SAR).”

- Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

“Radar provided an entirely new dimension in that the triangulation could be established by the accurate measurement of distance alone... these methods were of inestimable value in remote parts of countries like Australia and Africa which might contain minerals and other material needed by a resource-hungry world.”

- Edward George "Taffy" Bowen in his book Radar Days, Welsh Physicist, assistant to Robert Watson-Watt

A media member films the NISAR satellite, a joint Earth-observing mission between NASA and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO), inside a clean room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California on February 3, 2023. The NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite will measure changes in Earth's surface topography and create high-resolution images to track the evolution of Earth's crust, observing the flow rates of glaciers, the dynamics of earthquakes and volcanos, studying climate change, and changes to croplands.

Courtesy of Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images.

Paolo Perret, member of the ice avalanche risk management team from the Panpincieux glacier of Fondazione Montagna Sicura (Safety Mountain Foundation) looks towards the mountain from the radar station that monitors the Grand Jorasses glacier in the village of Entreves in Courmayeur, Alps Region, north-western Italy, on August 5, 2021.

Courtesy of Getty Images.

Electronic mapping research for Oil exploration, North Sea.

Courtesy of Damian Gillie/Construction Photography/Avalon via Getty Images.

“[Synthetic Aperture Radar is] using a radar to look down, mapping out... You can use that for forest fires, you can use that for figuring out whether vegetation is dry...NASA uses it. NOAA uses it... it's not a military use, it's a commercial use. It's using a radar, but it's looking down, not out, and making these synthetic pictures... it has a real applicability for commercial uses, not just for seeing tanks and troops on the ground.”

- Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

V. The Military

Tracking Ships & Aircraft Via Radar: A man tracks aircraft and ships (both friendly and enemy) within radar range on a 'Spider Web' chart, England, September 7, 1945.

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View of four sailors manning a radar scope, mid twentieth century.

Courtesy of US Navy/Interim Archives/Getty Images.

RAF Brawdy, Pembrokeshire, Wales, July 14, 1961. Central Tower, Control Tower, Air Traffic Control, Naval Air Station.

Courtesy of Memory Lane Galleries.

The Cold War and the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)

Excerpts from an Interview with Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret).

NORAD

“The North American Air Defense Command, NORAD, which is combined command of both Canada and the United States. We formed it together because we were very worried about the Russians. And we figured probably the Russians are going to fly over the North Pole...it's the shortest route from Russia to the United States and of course they have to fly right over the top of Canada, so Canada said, 'we don't want to get bombed either, so, how about we form a partnership'...it was agreed to in 1958.”

DEW

“So [NORAD puts] up a whole bunch of ground radar stations along the frigid North tier of Canada called the DEW line, the Distant Early Warning...to this day [those radars] are still up there, although they have been renovated with new modern radars, and they are no longer manned. At the time, they used to have...100 Air Force people up there keeping them going with maintenance, and keeping the engines going and the radar is constantly turning 24 hours a day...

“And in the 1980s we said, 'Oh, I think we could probably make this all automated.' And so, we put new radar up there and we bounce a signal off the satellite and comes down and... into a central place so you didn't have to have hundreds of people up in Alaska and [the] north of Canada, waiting for Russians. But we did for years, years and years and years, there were all kinds of people who were dedicated to that mission, and there were the DEW lines that ran all the way across [the coast].”

SAGE

“In the mid 50s they said, 'You know, we could probably invent a big supercomputer, that could pull in radar data that would detect not only the bad guy, Russians flying at us, but also detect where our fighters are, and then mathematically figure out the geometry that would need to have that fighter intercept that bomber.' You know the bomber speed, you know the bomber's altitude, you know the fighter's speed, the fighter's altitude, put it in through a software thing, crank the wheel... so they started building those, the SAGE system...

“Semi Automated Ground Environment (SAGE)...wasn't completely automated, it still had people involved with it...we wound up building...20 of [these] big huge block houses all over the United States with massive computers that take up rows and rows...like 50 refrigerators. It was just huge. So on the second floor of this block house you have all the computers. On the first floor would have all the air conditioning to keep them all cool. And on the third floor you've got all these guys sitting in front of radar scopes trying to make sure that when you detect it, a bomber that you picked up the phone, and said 'Okay, Scramble'...

“The fighters from whichever base was closest to those bad guys, they would run out and jump in their airplane...and immediately when they started climbing, they'd say, 'Where do we go?' A little fighter could only see out about 30 miles, but now you've detected a bare bomber, a Russian bomber, that's hundreds of miles off the coast, there'd be no way for the fighter to know where to go, but the ground environment would know. And so you would tell the computer, here's my fighter, here's the bomber, go intercept it and away they go.”

NORAD emblem

Courtesy of Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

Lt. Col. DeGering in front of the entrance to the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, a NORAD/Air Force facility

Courtesy of Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

Lt. Col. DeGering (right) receiving an award for his work at NORAD.

Courtesy of Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

“NATO...[has] put some [big] radars around their countries...One is in Turkey, and another one is in Poland, looking towards Russia with the idea that, 'Okay, if the Russians decide to...launch a missile at us, we, as NATO, have the capability of shooting it down.' They are very slowly building this, I don't know if any of their missiles are ready to launch yet, but I know that they were building the radars that would detect [Russian missiles].”

- Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret.)

Aegis Cruisers

Excerpts from an Interview with Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret).

“Lately, they have put radars on Navy ships, and they're called Aegis Cruisers... Those ships have a very powerful SPY-1 radar, that can detect missiles taking off. You float an Aegis Cruiser off the coast of Chine, or North Korea, or maybe Iraq, Iran, and if one of those bad guys decide to shoot a regional ballistic missile... one that would go maybe 1000 miles...well the Aegis Cruiser has got some really capable missiles on board, and this huge, flat, phased radar [that] does not turn around, it stares in one direction, and it... detects the missile as it's in its flight and then fires one of its own, very capable missiles and shoots it down. And now you do have a capability that's a radar plus a missile taking out another missile and this mission is called antiballistic missile system, ABMS...[so] if you think the North Koreans are up to no good, then you put a couple of Aegis cruisers nearby and just let them know, 'Hey, if you are thinking about doing something like attacking South Korea...knock it off, because as soon as you launch, we're going to shoot it down, and that will be a huge waste'...That's an amazing mission.”

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Sailor on Battleship by Aegis Defense System.

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Above(both): Courtesy of Getty Images.

AWACS

Excerpts from an Interview with Lt. Col. Randall DeGering, USAF (ret).

“As I mentioned, the fighters can see out, they use their radar for close in, they want to be able to go where the bad guy is and go in and shoot them down...So they need to have a really good radar that can break out all of those bad guys up close, but [the fighters] can't see far away. And so our mission in AWACS, was a warning and control system that would look out over 200 miles. We typically set up what was called an orbit and we would then do circles, just lazy circles in the sky for eight hours... our big radar on the top would turn round and round, I think every 10 seconds...[and the radar scopes] that we had were computer displays. And so ours were constantly refreshed... every five seconds or so, and we would have little symbols. It was kind of like a GameBoy... where you would see where the bad guys were, you see where your fighters are. You put little symbols on them and then you could say.... 'I've got the blue ones, you complete the red ones.' And then you would talk on the radio to the fighters and you would give him a vector and [direct him to the bad guy]... And then he would come back and he'd say, 'Okay, I've got a contact at 190 452,' and we'd say, 'Yes, that's him...Go get him.' And that was it. I mean that was all they needed...

“From that point on, it was their game. They were going to go in and they were going to investigate them or they're going to shoot him down or whatever... But they needed that help to figure out, out of this whole big sky, where are the bad guys? And so we were kind of air traffic controller in the sky. We could sit up there for hours and hours and hours and direct fighters to go here, fighters to go there.... And so you've got all these fighters up there and then they've go tankers behind them and then you've got [the] AWACS clear [in] the back that's going to watch the whole theater, and so that was why it was called battle management... and then typically we weren't in control of everything, we were just the airport portion. There was a ground command controls center... you've got a full Colonel or maybe even a Genreal down there and he's making big decisions...He would use our radar picture... [which] we would send down... [though] a data link. And the data link would go [from the] AWACS down to an antenna, and that antenna over to the General, and the General now has a picture of what we saw... And so he knew where the fighters were, he knew where the tankers were... now you're getting a real good picture on the ground of what was going on air wise.

“And that's where AWACS was essential. Because if you didn't have that, you knew you're launching planes out, but the planes... didn't know where the bad guys were. It was only luck that maybe they would find something and shoot them down. And it all hearkens back to the Battle of Britain, the main Control Center was seeing where the bad guys were, it knew where its fighters were on alert, and it could scramble those fighters out and go intercept the Nazis. And we were just doing the same sort of thing except we were airborne... It was a great mission. I did that for 10 years...

“Now, they've decided to retire the AWACS airplane that had the... Frisbee on the top going around mechanically, and they're going to replace it with a thing called an E-7...it has [a] long surfboard on top its...airplane. And instead of mechanically rotating that beam, they electronically rotate it; so they have little tiny cells inside that surfboard...picture like a rotating Christmas lights where, you know, they kind of blink all the way around and they give you a sense that they're going in a circle. And that's what that surfboard can do, is, it can electronically send out signals. It doesn't have to be mechanically turned, it can do [so] electrically. [And] this E-7 is going to be [the] replacement for my E-3 AWACS... it'll be the AWACS of the future.”