Thursday 24 October 2019

"Don't worry! What you see on the radar is because of small bits of alumiunium"

 It is not rain on the radar – it 
is “chaff”

Johns Weather Channel, via Facebook


No photo description available.


No this is not rain falling across SEQ. 

This is what’s referred to as Radar “Chaff”. 

Radar chaff is used as a radar countermeasure in which aircraft or other military targets spread a cloud of small, thin pieces of aluminium, metallised glass fibre or plastic. 

The radar-jamming material either appears as a cluster of targets on radar screens or overwhelms the screen with hundreds of returns, or “false echoes”. 

The reason for deploying the chaff was to shield the activity of Australian fighter jets from any potential prying eyes during a training exercise ( currently being conducted over SEQ ). Radar reflects off it and gets a bounce. Instead of seeing individual dots and a whole bunch of aircraft on the radar it just sees this wall of radar reflection coming back, so it’s difficult to identify targets. 

The chaff that was released is made up of aluminium fibres thinner than a human hair which are tightly wound together and then dispersed by the wind when released.

Remind you of anything?


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