system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How does bad weather obscure radar?

In my history textbook, it says that bad weather helped the Japanese fighter planes slip past radar on their way to Pearl Harbor. How does bad weather obscure radar?
gpt
First, you have to realize that the radar of the day was extraordinarily weak and primitive by today's standards. Second, the screen that the operator was looking at required both training and intuition to interpret. The screens of the time looked like a oscilloscope screen, with just a horizontal line across the screen. A radar return would look like a spike, or multiple semi-merged spikes, in this line. That's it. That's why long hours of training were needed to try and interpret what you were seeing, but also experience and intuition were required to really understand it. 

So the radar has low power, low resolution, and an output that requires an extreme amount of interpretation. 

Storms offer interference to the radar in the forms of the physical water in the air helping to scatter the weak radar returns, and in the case of electrical storms the lightning would also cause bursts of interference. So those little planes that really didn't have a whole lot of metal weight or a very big cross-section, could slip in behind the storms.