I normally proofread my posts after writing them before posting, but even I don't want to read again what I just typed because I hate this display so much.
I saw that the radar at NOAA had switched to the new site and I was going to post about it but it annoyed me too much. I hate it so much.
Before I could easily link to data for each radar site on my map:
http://tropicalatlantic.com/radars/
But now I would have to go through and create a customized bookmark for every single radar site in the U.S. and I've been waiting a few days to do that. I was hoping that they would do something different but of course they aren't.
I'm not sure I will bother. I might just link to the front page now for every radar site in the U.S. rather than create a zoomed in view for each radar site. Too complicated. I wanted to know how the link worked so I could add coordinates to the link to tell it what view it should load at. How hard is that for them to do? Why would they make the bookmark link encoded so you can't know how it works? Of course I have so many complaints.
I've spent a few years going through public radar data for every country on Earth that I could get radar data for and I can only think of maybe a couple that have displays more complicated than NOAA's now. It does have a lot of information and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. They have a lot of stuff they didn't have before and I like having it available, even as is in the product they have now. But the idea that they would get rid of something that worked, something that could have been easily updated to use JavaScript rather than Flash, is insane. This is too complicated for most people to use. People looking for radar from the U.S. government in a moment they really need it are going to have to figure this out?
I try to design stuff like this and I'm looking at this thing and it took me 30 seconds to figure out how to get back to the national view after clicking a particular radar site. If you select a specific site, you have to then click the icon that looks like something you would click to do something like minimize the window. (a double square icon in which they overlap) Some things I was going to write about I figured out, but it's just not that user friendly. Then again, the old way wouldn't work well on a phone, and not at all to view a loop if your mobile device didn't support Flash.
I was looking at all the different alerts there are. You can turn on all alerts or just view storm based alerts. There are so many different icons to click to expand to get to other options. To view all alerts you have to click the icon that has three dots vertically. Then select the drop down box that says "Storm Based Warnings" and you can then choose "All Hazards". But if you didn't do that and just saw the "No Alerts" message that is rather misleading. If you click that it then says "There are no storm based alerts in the visible area of the map." It should add that if you want to see all alerts, then you need to enable that. But I guess on a phone the screen might get too crowded.
I also don't like the short description of what you are looking at, like "BREF.QCD". This is designed for touch devices so when you hover your mouse over that it doesn't tell you what it is. You have to click it and then you get a list of things to choose from.
And it really is slow. Like, painfully slow. Ridiculously slow. I was loading the national mosaic and zoomed in New Orleans where there was rain. When I zoomed in it might have taken a minute to resolve better imagery. I've seen slow radar products, but this is ridiculous. I personally wouldn't use this site if I really needed radar data. Not in an emergency. It doesn't function well enough.
The video tutorials are helpful, but I think they need a separate display that doesn't take a video tutorial to learn how to use. (sort of use, it's still complicated)
https://www.weather.gov/radarfaq#videos
I really hope the slowness is fixed. At this particular moment, there isn't a lot going on in the country where everyone would be looking at the radar. What would it be like when it's busy? I can't imagine someone logging on for the first time when severe weather is approaching at trying to navigate this for the first time at that point. If you go to:
https://radar.weather.gov/
And then enter your location, it gives you the current temperature. It displays the national radar mosaic, but not the particular radar for you with all the options. You have to try clicking one of the many areas to click for more info. A down arrow, a hamburger menu, temperature with down arrow, alerts with down arrow or that double square icon which is what you actually want to click. Then "Radar station products". Then click the dot on the map. Then you load the radar data for your actual radar site and can choose the other products. And to choose the other radar products you have to know to click "BREF.RAW" because everyone will know that stands for raw base reflectivity and that obviously you click it for the more normal sounding options where only then will you get an option for storm total precipitation if that happened to be what you're looking for. Or velocity data. Before you could click the left column when you got to the old radar web page. Now you have to go through all that. I tried loading some velocity data before I typed mentioning velocity data and it was still not fully loaded when I started this sentence. And then I tried zooming in on it and again it was insanely slow before it rendered.
And oh my God I just forgot about trying to loop data. I just tried looping velocity radar data for a single radar site and it's been a few minutes and it's still just jumbled. Very little of it moves. Most of it is just frozen. It's literally not usable. I gave it a few minutes and it didn't work. Even if it did, I would like the ability to speed up or slow down the loop. And I would like having a slider that you can use to move the imagery along in the loop as well. But I can't even get the loop to work. I don't even know how to get it to update. I stopped the loop that wasn't working and the time stopped I guess where I paused it. It seemed like it might have refreshed, but I didn't want to view the loop any longer, just the latest image. I had to refresh the page which did work since the url updates with your view. From 9:59pm imagery it updated to 10:36pm then.
I've had enough of it for now. And just now the imagery I was looking at seemed to move but the time didn't update. Maybe an extra part of the image hadn't loaded yet. That's the other thing I don't like about dynamic products in this regard. Things all around load at different times. Something loads and you think that might be all of it but then something else might load. When it's a single image, it loads from top to bottom. Dynamic maps use tiles and while its relatively fine when a site is working, it's annoying to have different tiles loading at different times. If I were looking at a loop, the way something like this gets complicated is if the time says one thing but you don't know if the imagery is for that time or if those tiles are frozen. Some of the tiles are for one time and some from another time. And the radar image I was looking at did update at 10:41pm but it might have taken 20 seconds or more before it actually reflected the time it said at the bottom because the tiles slowly loaded.
Done looking at it for now. Though I am going to update my radar page and map to reflect just the front page of their new radar site.
And over a minute after I thought the radar data had updated all the tiles, some tiles still had still not loaded yet. My computer says it is 10:47pm. Did some 10:46pm data just come in? Were those 10:41pm tiles that just came in a minute and a half perhaps after the display said 10:41pm? You can't have something that works so poorly for a life saving application! And now the whole radar display flash as if it were updating and not long after said 10:46pm. I loaded another window with that same view. It loaded all 10:46pm imagery, well, it's still trying. But the imagery in that window doesn't match the 10:46pm imagery in the other window. Well it didn't, now the first window I loaded finally updated. Meanwhile, after perhaps a few minutes, the new window I opened only has half the tiles loaded. The old window is now blank trying to load the latest available imagery and the newer window still has failed to load what it should have loaded before. Now I'm really done with it! |