The receiving/transmitting dish of Mile High Radar is exposed before the radar's protective dome is fully installed. Mile High Radar--installed just northeast of Denver in the late 1980s--was a prototype for the national network of Doppler radars called NEXRAD (Next Generation Weather Radar), installed by the U.S. departments of Commerce, Defense, and Transportation in the 1990s. Thanks to NEXRAD, meteorologists can pinpoint severe weather with much greater speed and accuracy than before.