Re: New National Weather Service Radar is here
Posted by Chris in Tampa on 1/1/2021, 9:34 am
The imagery in this folder that I mentioned is often delayed:
https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/

At least it has been rather delayed since the switch happened last month to the new site.

Since some areas of NOAA's site use that data as thumbnails, like some forecast office pages:
https://www.weather.gov/mob/

And on point forecast pages:
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=30.4208&lon=-87.2172

I assume they will eventually fix the issues with it.

In anticipation of that, and because I've been meaning to do something like this for awhile, I created a display that simply displays that very simple imagery.

Simple display:
http://tropicalatlantic.com/radars/live/usa/noaa/

Mobile radar:
http://tropicalatlantic.com/radars/live/usa/noaa/?image=KMOB

Again, right now the imagery is often not updating like it should. The full display, that uses the GIS map, does have current data. It's just that this other imagery doesn't yet update as fast as it should. If it keeps being a problem, I'll email them.

Their "lite" imagery doesn't have roads or cities on it, so for some of the radar sites it's rather useless. While I could fit the imagery on a dynamic map, it would require doing it manually for each radar site. If they ever moved what is shown on a map, I would have to update it. I don't want to take the risk that they will move something so I won't add a map to the imagery. (or rather a dynamic GIS map under the imagery)

All this display does basically is let you control the loop. They have a GIF image loop that loops automatically, but you can't control the speed. This solves that.

It's still not a very helpful display, but since I had already created most of it for the live Bahamas radar I have, and for static radar imagery I have saved for historical purposes, I thought I would make it work for NOAA imagery too.

Another annoyance is that the time is in UTC. I did add conversions based on the radar site you are looking at. I might eventually add a clock based on the user's computer time to make it easier to see what the current UTC time is rather than trying to figure it out.

And another, Canada and Mexico are shown as water basically. It gets confusing when you look at the radar sites that include areas in those countries.

Because the display is rather useless, I don't even link to it on my site yet. I am going to use the technology on other aspects of my site, so I wanted to go ahead and see how it works. The newest thing I learned was how to change the URL of the page based on what you select in the field to select a radar site. It doesn't reload a new page. That will help me do other things later when I let people customize options on other areas of my site, eventually.

Now since Flash is officially dead, I have to work on converting my Flash diagrams to JavaScript.

Just imagine if NOAA fixed the delay issues and if they were to add back maps that you could add to their "lite" imagery. I'm sure they never will add maps back like they had before, but it would be nice! And so simple for them.
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New National Weather Service Radar is here - Beachlover, 12/19/2020, 12:42 pm
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