CALERA, Ala. (WIAT)- Birmingham's Doppler Radar is upgrading to dual polarization.  A new, additional feed horn will allow the National Weather Service to not only send out a radar pulse horizontally, but vertically as well.  This allows meteorologists to see inside the storm and receive very telling information.  "If we've got a hail stone, we'll be able to see how big that is, how fast it's falling, and we'll be able to make a pinpoint detirmination of where the hail's expected to fall," says John de Block, the Warning Coordination Meteorologist at the Birmingham NWS site.

Raising the radar bar doesn't come cheap.  The entire project will cost about $225,000, and will put the Birmingham Doppler Radar out-of-commission for as long as two weeks.  They'll have help, however, with radars from as far away as Montgomery and Mississippi chipping in to fill the gap.  "We do have radar coverage from surrounding radars, [so] that we feel very confident that we can continue with the warning process if need be," says Jim Stefkovich, who is the Meteorologist In Charge at the Birmingham site.  He adds that they chose this time period because the severe weather season is at a very low point for activity.

Birmingham is one of 160 sites getting the new dual-polarization technology, and the NWS hopes to have all of the new systems running by April of 2013.