LADETEC, the Legacy — translated title/excerpt

Maybe it's a bit pretentious of me to talk about a legacy, and besides, it's premature — I still have a lot of work left in me. Still, when you're closing chapters, you're supposed to take stock. I found myself in that situation recently, and I thought I'd take a look back at what I've done in these first 41 years of work. Of course, I include my own individual results; but above all, those of my team, the Technical Development Laboratory (LADETEC, its Spanish acronym), which operated as a non-administrative innovation unit within various groups or departments (under different names over the years) of the Camagüey Meteorological Center, and finally within the Radar Center, until it ceased operating on September 9, 2022. Let it be noted that I didn't leave development work by choice — it was the bosses' decision.

We leave behind a successful (centralized) technical service method for weather radars, grounded in innovation and validated by practice, which has let us increase weather radar observation frequency 18-fold, cut their power demand tenfold (to under 1.2 kW), and considerably reduce failure rates — raising the total number of observations while lowering the cost of each one.

We leave behind a radar calibration method built on several techniques: instrument measurements at the radar itself, measurements of the return signal from local clutter targets, measurements using the sun as a signal reference, comparison of Reflectivity readings against rainfall measured by rain gauges, field measurements against reference signals or to measure microwave power density in the radar's immediate surroundings, and inter-calibration between radars to keep the whole Cuban radar network within nominal parameters.

We leave behind an environmental management model that reconciles a radar's microwave radiation with environmentally safe operation, in line with the standards, in a densely populated setting (M. M. Gutiérrez's master's thesis).

We leave behind a study of the antennas' electromechanical drive system, with control strategies for precise positioning (M. Diez's doctoral thesis).

We left the radar network fully automated, modernized, and computerized, in a long process spanning from 1994 to 2006.

We fulfilled the Commander in Chief's charge to design and build a Weather Radar (Doppler) to serve as a prototype for modernizing the Cuban radar network (8 radars), implemented at the Camagüey radar under the designation RD-200SX (dual-wavelength, 3.2 and 10 cm),

We developed an industrial version of the Cuban Weather Radar (Doppler) prototype, implemented at Casa Blanca under the designation RD-100S.

We left the Cuban Weather Radar, commissioned by the Commander in Chief, fully implemented in three radars: Camagüey (2012), Casa Blanca (2020), and Holguín (2022). In addition, various systems that make up the Cuban Weather Radar have been partially introduced in several of the other radars in the network.

We left the primary data files (duplicated on a NAS) of all observations carried out by the Cuban weather radars from their modernization and computerization in 2006 through October 31, 2022, in the custody of the Head of the Radar Center at the Instituto de Meteorología (Cuba's Meteorology Institute).

We leave three ways to view the digitized information from the 8 weather radars: 1) on INSMET's (Cuban Meteorological Institute) WEB page on the Internet (www.insmet.cu); 2) on the Radar Center's page on the Internet (http://vestaweb.insmet.cu) and 3) interactively through VESTA|Proceso or TITAN at any point on INSMET's corporate network.

We leave, in the Radar Center's Data Center, the source code of every software application implemented under my direction on the Cuban radars from 1996 through May 2022. They are: VESTA|Proceso, VESTA|RDA, VESTA|Distribuidor, VESTA|Mosaico, VESTA|Web, VESTA|WebView, VESTA|WebView2, VESTA|PostGIS, RDA_BackEnd (as a task within VESTA|Distribuidor), VESTA|Cíclope and VESTA|RCP.

I leave a Radar Meteorology group trained in methods of analyzing the information, methods that let them characterize cloud formations from the standpoint of the information the radar captures, so as to identify the processes that give rise to them and link them to phenomena that may turn out to be dangerous.

I leave a synoptic-infographic method that lets you sum up, in a single annotated image, all the characteristics obtained from analyzing a copious, voluminous mass of radar data, in order to issue watches and warnings.

I leave a type of document for describing interconnections that, to my mind, eases repair work, in that the interconnections inside the radar are laid out in tables corresponding to each cable, each object and each signal, so that tracing any signal turns out to be easy.

I'm leaving my doctoral thesis (public on Research Gate) with the theoretical grounding of the Optimized Signal Processor in use in the Cuban radars. It also contains the theoretical grounding (formulated for the first time in the world and applied in a novel way in 1997 in the Camagüey radar) of the super-resolution method, which was applied operationally in the NEXRAD radars of the U.S. only eight years later.

I'm leaving my Spanish translation of the Radar Meteorology textbook used in more than 50 universities across North America, "Radar for Meteorologists," by Professor Ronald E. Rinehart, in digital form. I left a hard copy at InSTEC (home of the Faculty of Meteorology) and another at the Radar Meteorology Group of the Radar Center, besides the ones I gave away to many coworkers.

I'm leaving an executable copy of my Radar Calculator program, which lets any Weather Radar specialist run all the necessary calculations, including the results from my thesis on signal statistics.

What remains for history is the visit of the President of Cuba to the facilities of the Camagüey Meteorological Center and the Radar Center, prompted by the national and international achievements of the LADETEC team.