Confusing your Mw and Kw
Someone wrote "I'm not sure what the effective radiated power is for a weather radar - I assumed 50,000 watts" and continued "When I did the radhaz course, there was an exercise to find leaks in the waveguide of a 2 MW radar transmitter (the radiated power was much higher)"
Small point. Radar sets of this sort send out a pulse of energy then go quiet. That's because the radar set waits to see what comes back - which is of course a reflected pulse of radio energy from the storm cell (or hangar...).
If a radar set was emitting 50Kw of effective energy, think about the efficency of the radar transmitter. Say 50%? Then you'd need 100Kw of input energy with the other 50% appearing as heat. Is that a reasonable amount of power to obtain from the aircraft's generators? On that basis of efficency, a radar set of 2Mw (that's megawatts) would probably require a small ground based power station to run it...
Main point being a radar set can be thought of as a sophisticated microwave oven hence don't get very close to the radome when the radar is running. The effect of the weather radar on people is the same as that of (if you could) putting your body inside a working microwave oven. As a side effect, overcoming the safety switch on a microwave oven so that it works with the door open means that you have a nifty radar jammer which has be known to fool guided missiles...but don't stand beside the oven when doing this in a war zone.