A NEXRAD WSR-88D weather radar in Washington, the United States, operated by National Weather Service, NOAA.
- Station
- Spokane (KOTX)
- Site
- Rambo Road
- Operator
- National Weather Service, NOAA
- Network
- NEXRAD WSR-88D
- Antenna
- 47.681° N, 117.626° W, 2,384 ft (727 m) above sea level
- Products
- Reflectivity, composite reflectivity, echo tops, vertically integrated liquid, velocity, correlation coefficient, differential reflectivity, specific differential phase (KDP), spectrum width
KOTX is the NEXRAD WSR-88D weather radar at the National Weather Service office on Rambo Road, west of Spokane, Washington. The NWS Spokane forecast office at 2601 N Rambo Road runs it. The office's pages say the airport did not want a weather radar on its grounds during the 1990s modernisation, so the NWS took a parcel of about 20 acres north of Fairchild Air Force Base that the Air Force no longer needed and transferred to the NWS, and the office and radar were built there. Because the site is more than 5 miles from Spokane International Airport it needed its own identifier, OTX.
The office moved to Rambo Road in 1995 and the radar was built over the winter of 1995 to 1996; the office history says it went online in February 1996 as the first weather radar in the Inland Northwest. NCEI lists the station under the name Spokane in Spokane County with WBAN number 04106, its record beginning in July 1996. The NWS radar list gives the antenna elevation as 2,449 feet and the owner as the NWS.
Airway Heights is about 5 km to the south of the antenna and Fairchild Air Force Base about 7 km to the south-west. Spokane's centre is about 15 km to the east, Spokane Valley about 29 km, and Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, about 63 km to the east.
Radar shows rain, snow and hail, not cloud, and nothing below its lowest beam; far from the antenna the beam passes high above the ground.