My Database of Publicly Accessible Weather Radars
Posted by
Chris in Tampa on 11/12/2020, 12:17 am
http://tropicalatlantic.com/radars/
I finally completed, at least for now (it will always be a work in progress), my database of weather radars that are publicly available. I have been working for the past month on adding China's over 200 radars. It doesn't have radars for TV stations in the U.S., but it does have links to the other radar stations I am aware of around the world.
When I started the project the WMO Radar Database didn't have an interactive global map like they do now:
https://wrd.mgm.gov.tr/Home/Wrd
And then I found other sources as well:
https://www.rainviewer.com/coverage.html
http://eumetnet.eu/wp-content/themes/aeron-child/observations-programme/current-activities/opera/database/OPERA_Database/index.html
However, the WMO Radar Database and the RainViewer database all contain a lot of errors. For many of the radars in those databases, the coordinates given are estimates, or sometimes just completely wrong. I manually verified the location of every single radar using satellite imagery, a process that probably took a few thousand hours. I also found or estimated, based on available radar imagery, the range of each radar. Because things block the path of radars, like mountains, the actual circles don't represent the true range of the radar, but it is the best estimate I could do.
There are also some radars that are not in those databases. I had to do a lot of research using Google Translate to find information on some of the radars since obviously a lot of the information wasn't in English. I just took a look at the information I have saved offline about some of the radars, as well as imagery from some of the ones that required measuring the ranges of the radars in Google Earth, and there are over 10,000 files.
The 3D feature doesn't work in Chrome for some reason. It used to. It does in Firefox. I will need to investigate that at some point in the future, but I need to work on other tropical projects now. Eventually I will add an option to export the data to Google Earth and have options, such as only show the radars from a certain country, hide the ranges and perhaps other options.
I have a little more information on some of the radar sites in the unminified JavaScript source file that creates that display (1.3 megabytes):
http://tropicalatlantic.com/radars/scripts/original_scripts/tg_radar_database_original.js
(If you save it and then open it you must opened it as a text file or it will try to run and give an error) I minify that script to 470 kilobytes on the page itself so that it doesn't load as much text each time the page loads. No one needs to see that, but I link to it for those looking for a little extra information on some of the radar sites, like pictures and some of the documentation I used for some radar sites.
If anyone ever notices a radar missing, or a broken link, let me know. |
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My Database of Publicly Accessible Weather Radars - Chris in Tampa, 11/12/2020, 12:17 am Post A Reply
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