NWS Radar Changes

[peterq...@gmail.com]

I use the old standard skin (modified). The NWS radar site changed today and the optional radar graphic no longer works. Has anyone dug into this and figured out how to get the new site to work?

It's no big deal if not - I'll take a look myself and post something once I find out how to make it work with the new site.

[John Kline]

I’ve been grappling with this.  It is annoying.  The “new site” is maddening to interact with: https://radar.weather.gov/

There’s a FAQ about the change here:

https://www.weather.gov/radarfaq

The FAQ tells one where files can be downloaded.  I’ve started to look at them (they are gzipped), but, so far, I haven’t found anything acceptable to use.  I’m seeing a single color overlay (with no base map).  Still looking, but this is an awful change.

John

On Dec 17, 2020, at 4:05 PM, peterq...@gmail.com <peterq...@gmail.com> wrote:

I use the old standard skin (modified). The NWS radar site changed today and the optional radar graphic no longer works. Has anyone dug into this and figured out how to get the new site to work?

It's no big deal if not - I'll take a look myself and post something once I find out how to make it work with the new site.

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[p q]

Might need an iframe to the new page instead of the premade graphics. 

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[Tom Keffer]

I don't see how anyone could call that an improvement. Very slow and erratic. Thanks a lot, NWS.

I'm just going to remove the image. Too bad, I found it very useful for timing an excursion outside.

-tk

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[Marius Schamschula]

I used to run a script to composite several layers using ImageMagick and archive them. The only difference now is unzipping the gz file first.

Unfortunately, They have also removed the overlays from the web site.

I haven't looked into it, but I think MetPy might be able to pull in the base layer from NWS and plot it with overlays.

[p q]

I use Windy in an i-frame to get the wind environment. Where I live in the SF Bay Area, wind speed in SF in the summertime will give me a good indication when and if it's going to cool off in the evening. Looks like Windy also has the radar data as an overlay that might be a reasonable replacement.

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Peter Quinn
(415)794-2264

[Marius Schamschula]

I found a better solution:

Use Leaflet.

Use Leaflet https://leafletjs.com (I replaced the Google Maps widget on https://wx.aamu.edu with Leaflet when Google started charging...)

They even have an example of how to add the IEM NexRad tiles

https://leafletjs.com/reference-1.7.1.html#tilelayer-wms

[John Kline]

Although the directory listing here shows old timestamps:

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/

The loop is being updated (albeit still a few hours old and I’m not a fan of this radar imagery):

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/KMUX_loop.gif

Although not part of the loop, this image is only about 30m old:

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/KMUX_1.gif

It’s not clear one could determine which file has the latest image.  Maybe this will improve over time and the _0.gif will have the latest gif (and/or the loop will be updated regularly).

On Dec 17, 2020, at 4:18 PM, John Kline <jo...@johnkline.com> wrote:



[John Kline]

This thread has a nice solution (see URL below):

https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=40980.0

Terms of use:

https://www.wunderground.com/company/legal

(In the following URL, substitute your radar station for OAX.  Set weewx.conf’s Seasons radar_img value to this.)

https://radblast.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/radar/WUNIDS_map?station=OAX&brand=wui&num=18&delay=15&type=N0R&frame=0&scale=1.000&noclutter=0&showstorms=0&showlabels=1&severe=1&rainsnow=0&lightning=0&smooth=0

On Dec 17, 2020, at 10:00 PM, John Kline <jo...@johnkline.com> wrote:



[John Kline]

The loops in https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/ seem to be up to date today.    

For example:

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/KMUX_loop.gif

As such, that’s also an option, although these gifs are tough to get used to.

On Dec 18, 2020, at 9:38 AM, John Kline <jo...@johnkline.com> wrote:



[wfs...@gmail.com]

Yes John kind of crummy images and I just tried mine for KILX and it is two hours behind the current UTC.

[p q]

I hooked up the NWS gif and it's worse than useless. It's hours old and shows nothing, flashes clutter, and repeats. Now, it should show nothing but the flashing of clutter is super annoying. 

As much as I'm pissed at WU, I'm going to use their gif while it's available.

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Peter Quinn
(415)794-2264

[Chris Alemany]

Thank you for looking into this folks. It sounds as though they have gone the same route as Environment Canada did a long time ago now.  No more animated gifs available, instead they build the animations on the fly with overlays and a repository of images. The best I could do for Environment Canada radars was to create a shell script that runs on the web server cron that guesses at the current time stamp for the latest image and saves it to my webserver.

Less than great.

It sure would be nice if they could just provide an iframe code snipped that we could embed into our webpages.

Alas.

Cheers

Chris

[Mark Jenks]

I just sent an email to NWS.  I'll let you know the response if I get one..

----

Good Morning!

For years, there have been many many people who have linked your radar images and loops to their PWS (Personal weather station) websites.  I currently use weewx @ http://weather.mjenks.net
With the new radar, this is no longer possible, and the .gz versions just aren't good enough quality.  So I have to use someone else's radar now.

It sure would be nice if you could provide an iframe code snipped that we could embed into our webpages.    Or at least recreate the images and loops.

This is what I have been using that no longer works.

    radar_img = http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/N0R/GRB_loop.gif
    radar_url = http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/radar.php?product=NCR&rid=GRB&loop=yes

Thank you!

Mark Jenks

Station ID - DW7584

[Mark Jenks]

Email contact information here:
https://www.weather.gov/radarfaq

[Mark Jenks]

Finally got an answer back from NOAA.  I haven't see this link listed anywhere yet.   Images aren't the best, but it's something better than the .gz's and straight .gif files....

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/

[John Kline]

>  I haven't see this link listed anywhere yet.

It’s listed in this thread.

On Dec 30, 2020, at 8:35 AM, Mark Jenks <mjenk...@gmail.com> wrote:

Finally got an answer back from NOAA.  I haven't see this link listed anywhere yet.   Images aren't the best, but it's something better than the .gz's and straight .gif files....

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[John Mora]

I have been using these links:
https://radblast.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/radar/WUNIDS_map?station=ILN&brand=wui&num=18&delay=15&type=N0R&frame=0&scale=1.000&noclutter=0&showstorms=1&showlabels=1&severe=1&rainsnow=1&lightning=1&smooth=1

https://www.wunderground.com/radar/us/oh/cincinnati/iln

Just replace the station with the one you desire.

To me they are an adequate replacement until a better one is found

Cheers!

[Tom Keffer]

Here's another option: NOAA's aviation radar. https://www.aviationweather.gov/data/obs/radar/20201231/20/20201231_2038_rad_rala_lws.gif

The images load fast and cover the entire USA.

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[messyp...@gmail.com]

I just found out why my "http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/N0R/HTX_loop.gif" is broke, and, why I can't find the replacement. They redesigned the entire system (from something that was working fine) to what could be described as "the new Coke" of NWS radar services. This article explains it succinctly:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/21/nws-new-radar-website-slow/

Really disappointing.

--MP

[Ralph Underwood]

Anybody able to make the new and improved NWS radar work?  Has anyone written code to build a dynamic link for the aviation weather radar? It appears to me that we need to enter date and time into the url for the radar. I copied the aviation radar link into my skin.conf and it appeared to work, then after a week I noticed that its showing Dec 31 data.   https://www.aviationweather.gov/data/obs/radar/20201231/20/20201231_2038_rad_rala_lws.gif

[tarob...@gmail.com]

I ended up embedding an iframe (windy) in the radar.inc file and commenting out the lines that were no longer needed. This has worked great.

[Mark Jenks]

If you go up a level, the ones not in the folders are the current ones.

https://www.aviationweather.gov/data/obs/radar/rad_rala_lws.gif

[Ralph Underwood]

Thanks. I now have the aviation weather radar displaying.

[Nate Bargmann]

For the moment I've given up on the NWS stuff and am using Wunderground
maps. I've been able to integrate an animated loop into my weather page
by doing the following:

I started at: https://www.wunderground.com/maps

For regional radar from Wunderground navigate to:

https://www.wunderground.com/radar/us

The Intellicast maps may work as well, I've not tried them.

From the drop-down select the region for your area. In my case I chose
'KS - Salina', then clicked the Animate button. Now you should have an
animated regional map. At the lower right of the image is "Image Link"
which will open the animated map picture in a new tab (on my browsers).

I used the URL for this image:

https://s.w-x.co/staticmaps/wu/wu/wxtype1200_cur/ussln/animate.png

in the "radar_img" setting of the skin.conf file for both Standard and
Seasons skins. For the "radar_url" setting I used:

https://www.wunderground.com/radar/us/ks/salina

I used a similar approach for the satellite imagery. I navigated to the
US Infrared page and then started the animation and right-clicked on the
image and chose 'View image in a new tab' from the pop-up to get the URL
of the image. One can narrow these images into a regional view as well.

The results can be seen at https://www.n0nb.us/weather/ in the left
sidebar.

- Nate

--

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds. The pessimist fears this is true."

Web: https://www.n0nb.us
Projects: https://github.com/N0NB
GPG fingerprint: 82D6 4F6B 0E67 CD41 F689 BBA6 FB2C 5130 D55A 8819

[wfs...@gmail.com]

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I just noticed that the ridge/lite radar images and loops have been restored, with maybe slightly different URLs.  The index is at:

Index of /ridge/lite/ (weather.gov)