Kudos to NWS for their new radar site

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For a really long time, the NWS (US National Weather Service) weather radar data available on the official site has been antiquated and much inferior to that offered by third-party sources, like Weather Underground, The Weather Channel, and Intellicast (though that one is no more), which are all now part of the same company, at least as far as the web sites go. The problem I had with all of those sites (Intellicast had the best of the lot for this) was that my slow Swift laptop had trouble with those relatively heavyweight pages. It would work, but scrolling or zooming was very laggy and choppy, and I often overshot the target and zoomed or scrolled more than intended.

I got a note from the local NWS office (spotter network) to go have a look at the new site that’s going to be rolled out officially in about a week, so I did… and it’s fantastic. Unlike Weather Underground’s Wundermap, there’s no annoying ad taking up vertical space (on a 16:9 display that’s already on the short side vertically), and it’s much easier on the underpowered CPU in the Swift. It allows using the WSR-88D (Weather Service Radar, 1988, Doppler) or TDWR (Terminal Doppler Weather Radar), in higher resolution than I’ve seen from a free site before, and with the full complement of radar products available, including storm relative Doppler and dual-pol. And on top of that, it’s deliberately designed so that the URL changes with each modification the user makes to the map, so that one need only bookmark it to return to that same view anytime. The others have the ability to store the view data in a cookie, but my cookies are deleted repeatedly throughout the day, and I don’t like making exceptions, particularly when the site in question also carries ads, as all of them other than NWS do.

Go have a look, if you haven’t already (and you care about such things)! The preview (available from now until the official rollout) is at https://preview-radar.weather.gov/. After that, the “preview-” part of the URL will be removed.

 

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13 users thanked author for this post.

CADesertRat, G, Barry, MHCLV941, Nathan Parker, wavy, PaulK, DriftyDonN, jburk07, Pepsiboy, joep517, SueW, rexr

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Good tip and good on NWS. I have the ‘preview’ site up now and the rain is rolling in from the Pacific. Bookmarked.

Win10 Pro 20H2,backups with Macrium Reflect home edition

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This is very good and it appears to be light enough to use on a mobile phone! The other sites are too complicated unless the right map has been bookmarked for later use.

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Ascaris: “The problem I had with all of those sites (Intellicast had the best of the lot for this) was that my slow Swift laptop had trouble with those relatively heavyweight pages. It would work, but scrolling or zooming was very laggy and choppy, and I often overshot the target and zoomed or scrolled more than intended.”

In the USA, I have been using the Weather Underground Website for several years and had the same problem with slow page loading until I started using an ad blocker. Since then, I can access this weather service without problems.

When one sets it up to get reports from a participating weather station near where one lives (those stations are largely operated by small businesses and weather enthusiasts) updated every few minutes, one can also look at the radar images from: the nearest operational radar, the whole local area (several states) from all operational radars there, and the whole USA from all the stations across the country. As well as weather in other countries, such as: Canada, parts of the UK and, to a limited extent, Australia.

All the three levels of weather mapping can be animated to see how the weather has been changing and storms are moving, for example and more interestingly, in the direction of one’s place, and how fast. Also the kind of precipitation: rain, snow, freezing rain or mixed. There are forecasts of several important local weather variables (e.g. temperature, humidity, pressure, precipitation, wind speed) by the hour as well as for several days ahead. There are also videos produced by the parent company, the Weather Channel, on developing weather, announcements of area warnings and alerts issued by the NWS, astronomical information (e.g., hours of sunrise and sunset), etc.

One can also see, worldwide, the active tropical storms projected paths and times of arrival at various locations that, as I live near the US Atlantic coast and in a place the maps invariably and consistently show for many days before the event as being right in the path of all incoming hurricanes (which luckily rarely show up and mostly in a very weakened form), I watch religiously every single day during the stormy season.

https://www.wunderground.com/

I also follow the reports in “Eye of the Storm”, where Hansen, Masters and all the people who used to comment at their former Weather Underground place, as well as send local reports and data, have moved after they were told by the Weather Channel to leave.

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/section/eye-on-the-storm/

I also follow the local area reports from the Washington Post at the “Capital Weather Gang.” For me, it’s good to see their animated radar map that shows lightening activity and areas where warnings or watches have been issued for, among other things, tornadoes.

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I’ve also had good luck with WeatherBug.com (Disclaimer, I work for the weather data provider who powers the data to WeatherBug.com) and the maps at BaronWeather.com. The WeatherBug and Baron Critical Weather apps are extremely useful on mobile devices.

For businesses, I recommend Baron’s solutions or Earth Networks (I work for Earth Networks).

Nathan Parker

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JCpharm, GoneToPlaid

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Thanks for sharing the WeatherBug.com link. I like the layout and and the graphics.

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JCpharm, Nathan Parker

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The WeatherBug and Baron Weather sites offer the most dependable radar feed for a third-party site since both sites use radar data from Baron’s feed. You’re getting the same benefit that many TV stations and enterprises rely on.

The WeatherBug site also offers the most dependable lightning feed as well since it’s based on the Earth Networks Total Lightning network that can detect both in-cloud and cloud-to-ground lightning.

Nathan Parker

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Very cool site – a lesson in how a dedicated web site ought to work.  That you can also get the 7-day forecast and any weather alerts pertinent to your focus location is a great addition.  If I were a TV weather person, I’d be thinking about my next career!

The only thing that’s missing – and maybe not important – is a history loop, i.e., what’s happened over the past several hours.

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GoneToPlaid

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Radarscope. Mobile (free and paid) and desktop (paid, $13/yr). The fastest radar available. Every radar product one could need. I’ve been using NOAA Weather Radar since the old analog days both professionally (former longtime Emergency Manager) and personal. Radarscope has the FASTEST update times available. When there’s severe weather that is important.

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kiwigenie, Nathan Parker

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Surely you jest.  The new site is simply horrible, slow to load, updates the entire US even when you’re looking at a area subset of the data, and updates *every time* you zoom.  It’s not as granular, nor detailed, as the old radar site.  The “animation” loads huge blocks consisting of the entire US that take a good 60 seconds to fully load on a very fast connection.  Zooming is sketchy at best as you often overshoot your target with it practically impossible to slowly zoom in.  If you zoom during an animation it has to reload the entire thing again (remember – the entire US and taking a good 60 seconds).  You could also zoom much closer in with the old site.  I dread how badly this will perform during a weather event.  At least with the old site I could still see the US – now the whole thing will likely crash.  It just looks “pretty” to compete with all the junkware sites mentioned.  Give me their old radar sites any day.

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RockE, GoneToPlaid, SkipH

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I’ll add to the “anonymous” post # 2319826:

Only has ‘play’. Only a ‘pause’, therefore very hard to stop it on a certain time frame. If you miss the time you wanted to stop on, have to finish playing the whole series of animations and start over again.

Can’t ‘rewind’ the animations to a previous point in time. Can’t set a user-selected chunk of time intervals, and therefore can’t reply a shorter (user selected) time interval of animations.

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The new site is terrible for usability.  I have used the old version for years, particularly the loop to see how cells and storm fronts are moving.  This new version is virtually useless because the loop images are loading so slow, then seem to reload on every revolution,  this is true even when using aa single radar site.

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UUGGH-I am the biggest weather freak I know and the new NOAA radar, and the satellites are terrible-the satellite is at an angle that is not usable, and the radar is absolutely frustrating, incorrect, and shows inaccurate information on precipitation accumulation, cloud presence, etc.

I wish I could have kept the old system, I am now trying to find an alternative to NOAA

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Someone will lose their life monitoring this radar site.  Book it.  It will be sad state of affairs watching them try to explain themselves.   November 10, 2002, nearly 20 years ago, monitoring the old radar saved our lives as our home was completely destroyed by a high end f3 tornado.  Please explain to me how essentially going back to dial up speed will  protect my family in a similar event.  News flash, it won’t.   I personally feel the tax dollars would be better served elsewhere.

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Confirming the above:  As of 2021-01-26, composite radar is still miserably slow and clumsy:  a high-bandwidth product running on low-speed servers, apparently.  See the NWS Anchorage page (www.weather.gov/afc/radarpage) to see their mea culpa and explanation.

Other comments here indicate different experiences, which – since the NWS itself acknowledges a problem – suggests that those experiencing fast load times are perhaps looking at a “lite” or preview product and not the primary imaging product.

It would not be astonishing to me if it were the case that commercial intermediaries (private weather services) have a separate pipeline for getting NWS weather data, and that the product being made available to the public is inferior – by design or merely by convenient neglect – in a way that economically advantages those intermediaries.

 

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I used to be able to see the gust fronts and some lower resolution storm rotational motion on the old Adobe presentation but now the NWS radar display has taken all of that away.  It’s nothing but coarse pixelation on the order of one mile per pixel and the whole thing looking like a child’s water color painting.  No longer is there any detail .

I used the old display for worker life safety when having crews out during stormy conditions.  Now that is all gone and repeated comments to the NWS only result in “thank you for your input”.

The problem behind the slow load and jerky motion is because the designers load individual pages of map for each step in the loop.  Then your machine has to load each page repeatedly when it displays the moving radar presentation.  For some machines this really taxes the processor to do so.

I did read one comment from one of the higher up officials in the NWS commenting that while he appreciates the knowledge of the meteorologists and staff involved in the design of the new display he doesn’t think that they possess the experience to design an efficiently functional website of this nature and that it should have been left to an organization capable of doing so.

 

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OscarCP

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Very interesting to hear of the commentary from the NWS higher-up.  Meteorological SMEs indisputably have a critical role to play in designing any new version, but the current solution raises suspicions that the IT SMEs were not even given a back seat on this journey but were asked, instead, to ‘take the bus’ and meetup with everyone else at the destination.

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Maybe slow, but it has all kinds of cool squares every where.  Much better than the intricate, detailed cloud patterns.  My 3 year old kid loves the squares.

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The “squares,” assuming you don’t mean the tiles that are used by all of the online mapping sites and other radar sites as well, are the actual return data plotted on the map. The “detail” of which you speak, in that delightful, charming sarcastic manner, is the result smoothing algorithms, and is not detail… it’s interpolation.

 

 

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the new radar site is a threat to the safety of American citizens, a true example of government work at its worst.  total contempt for the needs of the taxpayers

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Personally that’s statement is a bit extreme.  Coders always think they are doing the right thing, they just may not get good feedback.

Susan Bradley Patch Lady

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anonymous wrote:

a threat to the safety of American citizens

How so?
How many have died as a result of being informed about the weather by that site?

cheers, Paul

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outrageous to put it on the consumer/financer to have to try to academically prove that users are finding the interface misleadingly uninformative. what are they supposed to do as an individual? the very market research that SHOULD have been undertaken by the respective “decision” makers before taking on a project that totally changes the product? Thats awful enemy of the state-ly of you.

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My “favorite” example of how terrible this new site is….    the colors in the key do not match the colors on the map!  That’s sort of one of the most basic and important features of a weather map of any kind, and they didn’t even get that right.  Ridiculous, and sad that it is so much worse than  it used to be, and they don’t seem interested in fixing any of the problems they created.

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anonymous wrote:

Surely you jest.

No, and your experience is just the opposite of mine.

The only thing we more or less agree on is that the zoom is touchy, but no more so than Google maps.  I would also point out that “preview” is the URL for a reason.

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MHCLV941 wrote:

I would also point out that “preview” is the URL for a reason.

From the (soon to be shut down) Portland, Oregon Radar site (my nearest NWS Forecast Office):

“On or about December 16, 2020, the web pages here at radar.weather.gov will be replaced. Click here to preview the new site now”

URL goes to the “preview” site.

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I wonder which weather site you, who have been posting after Nathan’s one, are discussing. It always helps others to appreciate one’s comments to begin them by explaining what they are all about.

Ex-Windows user (Win. 98, XP, 7); since mid-2017 using also macOS. Presently on Monterey 12.15 & sometimes running also Linux (Mint).

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MHCLV941 wrote:

No, and your experience is just the opposite of mine.

And mine.

It starts out with a view of the CONUS, and I zoom to where I want it to be. Even on my poky laptop, it is responsive and fast. It loads the tiles I need in a second or two, and it’s good to go. What it’s loading or rendering outside of the viewport doesn’t bother me one way or the other as long as it doesn’t bog it down, and it doesn’t on my Swift (and certainly not on my computers that are actually swift, but are not called Swift).

I don’t find the zoom to be overly touchy at all. It’s about how I would adjust it if it had a control for that. All the information is available, including dual pol and echo tops, and it’s lighter and faster than any of the private sites I’ve tried. Every one of them bogs down my Swift to the point that it’s painful to use, and even though I have ads blocked, at least one of them still reserves the space for the ad, limiting the vertical space even more than it already was on a landscape 16:9 display. The place for the ad can’t be zapped with uBlock Origin, either.

It would be nice if you could walk the animation back one step at a time as needed, as SkipH wrote, and it is true also that it limits the zoom-in more than other sites (though that’s only a bother for me when I want to be nitpicky and put the location exactly with me at the center). That may well be changed with feedback, as the underlying map API certainly supports higher zoom levels.

But for me those are very minor things compared to the positives. The old NWS site was so bad as to be essentially useless, so I only used private sites like WU’s Wundermap. There’s a lot of info available there, but it bogs down my Swift badly, and that is often the one I use for watching radar (once I have my coffee. I always have coffee when I watch radar, everyone knows that!).

Wundermap also always insisted on starting with either the personal weather stations as the only thing displayed, or more recently, with no data displayed until I clicked “radar” each time. There was no option to store the correct view in the URL… it offered to do it with a cookie, but cookies get wiped as soon as the tab is closed, so no go on that.

The old NWS site has a static 600×550 pixel image for the radar from any given radar site, representing a static space of about 250 x 225 miles. The only way to zoom it is to zoom the entire web page, and at 600×550 resolution, those pixels get rather big, leaving a very blocky image. You get a .gif of several of those same static images if you want the animation. It is not possible to change the speed or stop the animation, as that is embedded into the .gif itself.

If you meant the flash version… I wouldn’t know about that. Most the world moved on from Flash a long time ago, with the NWS being the only site I was aware of that still wanted me to enable it, and I can’t recall the last time I had it on my PC. I don’t think I have ever installed it in Linux, and I began my move to that in 2015.

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I think the new NWS radar site is terrible.  There is less control, less contrast and far less precision.  A sad day for the casual weather enthusiast or anyone looking for precision.  I am also still looking for the options to examine rotational velocity etc.  It is so bad that I don’t think this is just disappointment with change.  It is a big step backwards for the NWS and AI cannot imagine how you could see this otherwise.  Boo!

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RockE

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I would beg to differ with you on NWS’ new RIDGE II radar that was introduced on 12/17/20.
While the static view radar is adequate (though the national map seems more cluttered than previously), yet the radar loop (in any zoom view) is completely unusable, in that the frames of the loop take forever to load, and then once loaded, run painfully slow with a lot of jerkiness. Once you get the loop running, if you then scroll the zoom in or out again, it has to go through the re-loading process all over again. It’s not my computer, since my computer loaded and ran the pre-12/17 radar loops instantly (whether local, regional, or national), and they would then run very smoothly. While the older colorations may seem “outdated” (I don’t think they are), I find that the new muted colors blend in way too much with the newer map backgrounds, unlike the pre-12/17 version in which the radar returns stood out from the background, making them easier to read. While there are some added bells and whistles with the newer format, it seems a bit over-plumbed to me, and I have been a very long-time exclusive user of NWS weather products (storm spotter, among other things). I have always promoted NWS’ products to others as being the best; but I would have to say that, at least with reference to the radar loop, the “updated” version seems much more like a serious downgrade to me. If I want a radar loop, I’m now forced to go to SPC’s site, although theirs is only a non-zooming national view. I’ll be looking around until I can find a radar loop that more closely approximates NWS’ pre-12/17 radar loop.

p.s. Just read Post # 2319826, and I concur totally with that post, in addition to what I just posted on my own.

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[SkipH]

Here’s another obscure/buried NOAA.gov site, a national image of static radar.

https://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/maps/ncei/radar

I zoom into my area of the US (Pacific Northwest, where it’s raining again). The image zooms smoothly in and out.

Then, the lack of functions kicks in: you can only manually go backwards from the current time, OR…set the time back, say 60 minutes, from the Date/Hour/Min option, then click the “Update Map” button, then use the “+5 min” button to manually step forward through the last 60 minutes of echoes. But at least it works.

As clunky as this is, it is way better than the other site, which as “anonymous” posted in # 2322571, never fills in most the tiles on my system either (or on more than one system in my household), and so the “play” function never plays anything.

I’m also back to using the Weather Underground “WonderMap” which used to be semi-worthless, but is now LOTS better than the “new” NWS regular site.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by SkipH.

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SkipH wrote:

As clunky as this is, it is way better than the other site, which as “anonymous” posted in # 2322571, never fills in most the tiles on my system either (or on more than one system in my household), and so the “play” function never plays anything.

That’s not what I see when I visit the site. As I zoom in or pan, I am not explicitly aware of tiles. It just does what it’s supposed to.

I don’t know why it is not working properly on your PCs, but what you describe surely is not the site working as designed. I’ve used it a lot since I “discovered” it, and it works nicely for me.

NWS has the only site (other than the old site’s animated GIFs, which are not zoomable anyway) that’s been light enough to work on my slow Swift laptop without having zoom animations that look like a slideshow, one that keeps zooming right past where I want after I take my hand off the mousepad. Someone else mentioned them being light enough for use on a phone too, which implies that they also found the existing offerings to be too CPU heavy.  It’s nice to not require massive overhead like the other sites do. You may not notice it if you use a reasonably powerful PC (I don’t see the downsides on my desktop or G3), but it’s evident on the Swift.

WU’s Wundermap shows composite reflectivity in high detail, but the other specialized offerings that are only in their “Nexrad” viewer, like the base reflectivity at various elevations, base or storm relative velocity, dual-pol, echo tops, etc., are at much lower resolution, and in a viewport that only offers the actual radar data in ~450×450 resolution, though at least you can zoom the content.

I’ve yet to find any web-based, free offering that has all of the data sources the new NWS site does at a good resolution, and certainly none of them have been able to store all of the settings just by bookmarking the site, and without space-wasting ads reserving space for themselves (even though the ad that goes in there is blocked).

The inability to step the past images manually or change the animation speed is an annoyance (which it is my guess will be addressed in time), but that in itself doesn’t negate all of the positives, which it still does better than anything else I’ve seen (and if there is something that does all the NWS site does better plus the other stuff, I would love to know about it).

Compared to the 600×550 GIF animations of the old site, which you also can’t alter the animation speed on, but that also didn’t even have the ability to pause, where a single pixel represents almost a 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile square, this is better in every way.

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Ascaris:

Perhaps you can post a direct link to the NOAA radar site you are using that actually works.

I do not seem to be the only person posting in this topic that seems to think the “new” radar site is so wonderful, let alone even functional.

I get to the non-functional radar maps by starting at the Portland, OR, NOAA site at:

https://www.weather.gov/pqr/

There’s about 4 ways to get to a radar map from this NOAA site, the full national ones seem to show areas of the country that have rain/snow going on, but when zoomed in…they basically die. If you go directly to a “local” one (Portland or the Langley Hill site), those are really dead: don’t fill in or zoom/scroll.

I’ve attached a screen shot of the “Oregon” area with stuck tiles, after waiting for about 30 seconds (finally sort of filled in as I’m writing this, took more than a minute). Don’t even think about zooming out or moving sideways…just a bunch more empty tiles and/or snail-paced filling in. (Also attached a screen shot of what it looks like after panning east).

Oh, when I clicked the Play button at the bottom of the image…very slowly plays a few tiles, then they all go blank, or fill in a few, they try to play the next time-frame image (usually also blank or missing tiles).

While monitoring incoming data flow on a wired Ethernet connection (100mbps cable connection), the data flow is very sporadic and not all that fast, basically stops when tiles stuck. Also my CPU usage and GPU usage is low.

Also a big difference between the north-east coast map from Weather Underground and the same area on NOAA: the Boston-Maine area has lots of returns, and the NOAA map: zilch. At least the Pacific Northwest returns are sort of the same.

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SkipH wrote:

Perhaps you can post a direct link to the NOAA radar site you are using that actually works.

The link you provided works fine for me. I’m accustomed to web pages taking a few seconds, where I kind of tune out for a bit while waiting for the load, so I didn’t actually notice any discrete tiling effects until you and anonymous mentioned it. I’d have assumed they were there (unlikely as it is that they would use vector graphics), but I just tune them out as long as the page loads in reasonable time. If it hung for 30 seconds or more as it does for you, that would be a different story, of course, and the missing tiles would stick out like a sore thumb.

Here’s what I see when I look at the radar using your link, then “Radar,” then “Local.” It takes about 2 seconds for the whole thing to load (Wundermap takes about five, by comparison):

Zooming in takes about 5 seconds to finish loading:

And if I zoom back out some and pan to the east, again about 5 seconds to finish:

I don’t know why it is not working for you or anonymous, but you can see by the positive messages that others have posted above that not everyone has the aforementioned issues.

My internet connection is 40 Mbit/s DSL, fwiw, connected by ethernet to my desktop and wirelessly to my laptops.

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Ascaris:

Thanks for testing that link to the various radar images.

Late last night (12-25-2020, PST), the multiple image fill-ins on both NOAA sites started working quite a bit faster, as did panning/zooming. I changed nothing on my end.

I can only assume that some “tech” at some NOAA location figured out the performance was terrible at various locations and “fixed” it.

As for the Weather Underground “WonderMap” radar images, those fill in, in about 1 second after turning on the “Radar-Past” option on a blank map from the mini-map on a weather station reporting screen.

If I go to the “Maps & Radar” menu option on the tool bar at the top of the screen, then click on the “Interactive Radar” choice, it fills in the screen basically instantly. If I zoom out a few clicks, the other parts of the US fill in as fast as I zoom. If I pan to the East coast of the US, that area is already filled in, and if I zoom in on Maine/Nova Scotia, (where there are currently numerous echoes) that fills in instantly.

If I then select a play speed of 5X, and hit the play button, the images are a bit jerky as those past images fill in, but then after they have filled in, they play fine.

I just scrolled back to the West coast while playing at 5X, and the West coast images were playing as I got there.

So the WunderMaps work just fine at my location, and the NOAA sites are better, at least for now. Hope they stay that way.

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The new site is abysmally slow.  Southern California radar loads one frame every five seconds.  Then once all of the frames are loaded, it continues to display them at – you guessed it – one frame every five seconds.

I would like to think that I’m missing something, but I fear it is not the case.  I’m certain that neither my hardware, nor my connection, are limiting me.  Any advice from those who have been successful would be gratefully accepted.

NOAA has been my choice for consuming weather products for decades, and I would like that to continue.  But the current radar situation looks bleak.

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I just zoomed in to SoCal, and it worked just fine for me, cycling repeatedly at the rate of about a frame a second. Took the page only a couple of seconds to load. My internet connection is through a cable company, and my speed is 30 megabits per second, definitely not the fastest by any measure.

Could be you have a hardware issue that’s rendering the rather poor results you’re getting, or a side effect of your ISP’s actual speed given to you. My system is Windows 10 Pro 64bit on an i5-9500, 16gigs of system memory and a separate video card with 4 gigs of its own memory. Browser is Firefox 84.0.1.

Although my system is newish (but not the latest generation of processor or motherboard chipset) it’s not what some would call a barn burner of a system.

 

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I just tried it in the LA area, and the initial zoom-in from the national map was near instant, but once I put it in motion, I saw the slowness you describe. Even slower, actually, loading the various images from the last few scans.

Since the initial page load is fast, but the additional radar images are slow, I would guess it has to do with prioritization at the server level, and I would think it would improve in time as they nail down the scalability issues that come from general release.

For the people who don’t like the look… nothing that can be done about that, I expect. I do prefer the color scheme where the lowest echo returns are a shade of green rather than gray, but it’s not a big deal to me. Neither is the inability to zoom in as close as I can with other weather sites. If I can get high res images of dual-pol, velocity, and different elevation scans, without bogging down the Swift, that’s fantastic to me.

Opinions vary, of course, on everything… it’s why I keep saying we need lots of choices in things like our operating systems, browsers, and any other piece of software. The trend these days is to have the developer declare one way to be the One True Way and not have any choices, and I think that’s definitely the wrong way to go.

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DriftyDonN

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I find the new radar horrible. I really dislike it, can’t say how much I dislike the new graphics and lack of local radar access without having the whole map. Really miss the old simply national loop. Don’t know about you, but it takes forever to load on my computer with a decent cable connection (better than 100MB). Longer on my cell phone.

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With cable there is a down side. Yes, they do try to get you the speed you’re paying for. BUT, if everyone in your neighborhood is using their cable connection for bandwidth-intensive tasks, everyone will have very slow speeds. The pipe that’s in the cable that comes into your pre-defined area is shared amongst everyone in that area, causing slow downs if everyone’s on at the same time with tasks that take up a lot of bandwidth.

One thing you may want to do is to do a speed test at a site such as https://www.speedtest.net. Once there, select the closest server and give it a whirl. That will tell you how much of your promised speed you’re getting at the time of the test. I’ve run it randomly over the years and I sometimes get speeds slightly over the level I’m paying for (3 to 5 megs above), and frequently slightly below the level I’m paying for (2 or 3 megs below).

If you get a result that’s significantly lower than what you’re paying for, repeat the test at a different time of day on a different day. If it’s still sub-par, (or about the same as it was the first time you ran the test) then it’s time to start looking at what’s going on with your setup or your provider’s setup.

There are a couple of other things that could be causing slowness in rendering the site. One is the hardware in your computer not being able to handle the data from the site too well for some reason, and the other reason is that perhaps there’s a bottleneck in the route (pipe) between your computer and their server.

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Nathan Parker

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Tonight (12-28-2020, ~19:00 PST), the “new” site (at Portland, OR) is back to being dead slow, fills in slowly as tiles. Since there’s no precip in the Pacific NW right now (yea!), zooming out or panning east is s..l..o..w.

On a new area of the US where there’re some echos (Lake Ontario/New York state area), once it does fill in, and clicking on the Play function…each image takes at least 5 seconds to fill in and it never seems to get a full sequence of images to play properly, all images are very jerky.

The other day (see my post #2322821), the system was working pretty good.

Meanwhile the more obscure site at:

https://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/maps/ncei/radar

responds fast, as I mentioned in my post at #2322675.

So I’d have to agree with Ascaris, that the problem is most likely at some NOAA server that is managing the images. Somebody needs to wake up and actually try using this stuff from home, not some system that’s hooked directly to it by some very high speed connection.

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I want my local radar link back… I absolutely hate the new web site. Loved the old site. The funny thing is you can get a tiny picture of your local radar, but that is it. So somewhere out there is a live link and I want it back (and want the in motion view also).

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Try this site if you like weather radar {fill in desired location):

https://www.accuweather.com/en/us/denver/80203/weather-forecast/347810

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The new radar “product” rolled out by NWS is horrible.
Where it used to be possible to see the lake effect snow streamers coming off of Lake Ontario and predict with some confidence their arrival time, density, etc.
The image now has much less detail, loads slowly, never resolves into any readable loop in a usable time frame, etc.
I could go on and on, but the bottom line is that the data is no being presented in a way which is completely useless.
Bring back the old version.

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the new NOAA NWS weather radar page (https://radar.weather.gov/) is conceptually an improvement, but the implementation makes it useless due to horribly slow performance.

The old flash and older non-flash sites processed 20-minute radar loops in seconds, now a single radar loop (regardless if it is storm intensity, velocity, 1-hr precipitation totals, or total precipitation) TAKES UP TO 20 MINUTES!!! 

ascaris, Kudos for what? a pretty background map?

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[Ascaris]

Have you read any of what I wrote?

It worked fine for me.

Edit: At the time I wrote the thread title, the new NWS site was a preview, not yet rolled out officially. Everything worked really nicely. Now, I am starting to see the same issues everyone’s mentioning, but if you look early in the thread, several others had good experiences with it too when it was still a preview site. I think their servers are probably at capacity and they need to scale for the load, which they may not have anticipated based on the traffic they got beforehand. I haven’t bothered with NWS for radar data myself in years, but it’s all I’ve used since the update, and others are probably the same… leading to performance issues.

We can do without the sarcasm, ok?

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• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Ascaris.
• This reply was modified 2 years, 5 months ago by Ascaris.

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The new NWS radar web site is a disaster. Images for loops take forever to download and even after they are downloaded, the motion is excruciatingly slow and uneven. Useless to track slow moving winter storms, much less summer thunderstorms with embedded tornadoes. This is the case even when downloading data from a single radar site. The hourly and storm total precipitation images do not seem to work at all. It seems like the objective was to have a visually impressive web site rather than one that could be of use in tracking dangerous weather in real time.

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RockE

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Agree with the others posting how terrible the new site is.  I’ve sent an email to

nws.radarfeedback@noaa.gov   asking what changes I need to make to my windows 10 pc so that I can loop the new radar properly.   Going to the FAQ section did not help.

Perhaps if others gave feedback it might convince them there is a problem.

I just sent the email this morning, so awaiting a reply.  I also had the same problems with the preview site and I sent feedback, so this is not a sudden occurrence.

Moderator Note :Edit to remove HTML. Please use the “Text” tab in the entry box when you copy/paste.

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anonymous wrote:

nws.radarfeedback@noaa.gov asking what changes I need to make to my windows 10 pc so that I can loop the new radar properly. Going to the FAQ section did not help. Perhaps if others gave feedback it might convince them there is a problem.

There’s nothing you can do to make the radar loop properly, if that was a serious question and not one intended to spur NWS into action. It’s on their end.

They certainly know about it:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/12/21/nws-new-radar-website-slow/

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I’m here in Kennewick Wa. with a fast connection. I can’t imagine what it will be on my 36-48 Kb dialup at home in Goldendale. It worked before the change.

Very slow on the fast connection, 30 Sec load, frame rate for animation is 3-5 Sec per frame with complete redraw and missing panes. So maybe location is the key. I don’t know where they are serving this stuff, But it’s a dog here in the Pacific NW.

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Wow-I use to use the NOAA radar for farming, mushroom hunting, outdoor recreation, and much more-it has made my day to find others that have the same problems as slow loading, confusing signals, odd angle for viewing, inaccurate data, etc.

I don’t even see how the new site can be used for the functions I have been accustomed to for the the past 10 plus years- It is easy to complain about “free” services, but I cannot see how any practical user would like the new system over the old.

PLEASE, do not “update ” the AHPS site

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I concur with the users who think the new site is terrible.  Static images look good panned out, but zoomed in they look like blocky graphics from 20 years ago.  Looping radar is so abysmal, I don’t even bother.  I am an IT specialist working with on a 250Mb connection, so bandwidth isn’t the issue.

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Once you’ve poked around the new radar page, how do you easily get back to the NWS Forecast page (or Past Weather, Safety or Information for that matter).  Should be at top of Radar Page.  (maybe they’re workin’ on it.)

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I won’t repeat the details of those who have posted previously. In a phrase “the new radar is horrible and a huge step backward. It’s terrible and pretty much unusable.” For all the reasons outlined above.

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It’s working pretty well for me. Most of the performance issues that I saw previously are gone right at this moment (though that could change as the servers are more or less loaded at different times). I zoomed in on several areas of the country where there is significant precipitation, panned around, and it all worked quickly enough to be usable. In California, it was really fast, as fast as WU or any other site (but with many more data types available), while the system in the northeast did cause the site to lag just a little.

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I still use the Wunderground Web site, that is very easy to use, to look at local conditions, local forecasts and the plots of weather radar in the local area, the latter also at a regional level encompassing several states, and also at the whole USA + Canada level. The images are initially static, but they can be animated by pushing a button, so one can see the movement and changes in mainly stormy weather over periods ranging from 30 minutes (local) to one hour+ (regional and USA.). It has ads, but it does not mind the use of adblocker. The following URL link, if it works for you, can give you an idea of what this is like; right now, as I write this, it shows the current weather with the big snow storm in progress and can be animated to see what has happened in the last hour:

https://www.wunderground.com/radar/us/va/roanoke    (Click off the green popup so you an see.)

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WU’s Wundermap is fine if you have a fairly decent PC and are only looking for base reflectivity. It bogs down my slow Swift noticeably, though (it’s much better on my G3 and desktop), and I like to look at the various elevation scans, dual pol (correlation coefficient), and storm relative velocity too, and WU’s display of these, while being better than the animated GIFs that the NWS used on the legacy site, are still much inferior to the display on new NWS site, if you can get it to work.

Finding a free site that has all of those products and doesn’t bog the Swift down hasn’t been easy, but the new NWS site ticked all the boxes. I did see some of the slowness that people described before, but it’s been good each time I have looked at it lately. If you read the link I posted a while ago, it seems to be an issue of the NWS deciding to self-host at the same time that they moved to the new HTML5 version of their site, and apparently they did a really poor job of assessing the amount of server infrastructure/bandwidth/whatever was the issue.

 

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OscarCP

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I find that base reflectivity is sufficient for getting the information I need: how fast the storms are moving, as shown by the radar’s picture animation, when they are likely to start, and how intensely, in my neck of the woods; or, if they are already on top of it, how soon are they going to clear out, etc.

There is also the weather warnings from the NSW appearing, when they are put out, on a bar at the top of the screen. Also, in the main menu bar, there is a Maps menu that gives access to a variety of maps, such as of fronts and pressure isobars showing the centers of high and low pressure cyclones and anticyclones and of weather fronts, the position and shape of the polar Jet Stream, etc.

https://www.wunderground.com/maps

(Click off the green popup.)

For local weather, I also have access to a good Web site run by the Washington Post. In it there is a section called “Weather Wall” that shows the local radars reflectivity map animated and also the areas where there are warnings from the NSW, in particular for gale winds and tornadoes.

One problem with  watching these kinds of displays, as mentioned by Ascaris, is having a slow computer and, or a slow Internet link, to which I would add not using an ad blocker (ads slow things considerably), and maybe the browser one is using.

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Are you still sold on the new NWS site? It’s absolutely horrible!!!!! The old site worked much better, loaded much faster, and was easier to use.

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It is HORRIBLE!

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Thank you for opening a line of discussion about the new NOAA weather radar in the new format, but you forgot to mention that it moves at a snails pace and when the warning sirens start to howl, you will find yourself losing your sanity waiting for the page to load the time views to show the incoming storm and it’s direction. In short, IT SUCKS! I say shame on NOAA for not doing a better job and just bowing down to the internet gurus who decided Flash was too expensive to use.

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Ascaris

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Nothing to do with cost. Flash is very insecure and had to be patched every other day to prevent your machine being taken over by malware.

cheers, Paul

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Thanks for stating your opinion nicely. I appreciate that.

I posted my original comment when the new NWS site was still a test site (when the local NWS office asked us spotters to go test it out), and it was not slow for me at that time. I’d tried out all of its features back then, but my initial review was still based on a single session.

For most of the time since then, after it was officially rolled out, it has also not been slow for me, for whatever reason. It could be my choice of times for watching radar, my use of a script blocker, my geographical location relative to the radar server, or just dumb luck, but it has been my main radar site since that post, and it has usually perfomed well. I did see some instances of painfully long waits since then too like many people have reported, but it has not been all the time, or even a big chunk of the time. I’ve had moments when Wundermap from WU did the same.

I understand that not everyone has my experience with the site, but I ask that others (the more angry ones, not you) accept that also. They seem to want me (as OP of the topic) to recant my praise, denounce the site, and declare it absolutely unusable as they have, but I can only call ’em as I see ’em, and if it works for me, that’s what I report.

The problem, it seems, is not with the HTML5 code itself, but the decision the NWS made to move to self-hosting at the same time as the HTML5 rollover. They seem to have greatly underestimated demand at peak times, and for some reason, it’s still not fixed, which I can see by virtue of reports like yours that continue to roll in.

As for Flash… I haven’t had that installed on my system in at least five years. It’s been on the way out for a long time! Apple famously never permitted it in iOS, which did a lot to ensure that HTML5 versions of sites would be created, and Adobe announced the upcoming EOL of Flash in 2017.

The major browsers have dropped the ability to use Flash in the final bit of 2020, so if you use an up to date Chromium or Firefox, you could not use it even if you wanted to. On top of that, Adobe put a time bomb in its recent Flash plugins, and it would not work after the EOL date even if you still had a browser that could use it. If NWS had not dropped the Flash site, there would be very few people who would still be able to use it.

Because of how long ago I dropped Flash, I have no recollection of the NWS Flash site. All I saw when I visited the NWS site was the legacy version, which used small, low res animated GIFs for the radar loops, so I’ve been using non-government weather sites instead for quite some time (they moved to HTML5 long ago). The old non-Flash site was not slow, but if you want to talk useless, a radar image where a single pixel covers close to a square mile (and zooming in just made the pixels bigger)  has got to be a contender.

I don’t remember when I last had Flash installed or what weather sites I was then using, but I probably dropped Flash a considerable time before I began the move from Windows to Linux in 2015. I remember going through multiple security updates of Flash in between actual uses of Flash… I was spending far more time updating it than using it, so I just removed it.

 

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The new format is a disaster for me. I’m probably like 80% of the population. I’m not a meteorologist and don’t need all the intricate weather stuff the site provides. What I do need is a quick to load animation of the storms that are coming my way with colors to indicate intensity and boxes to show warnings. I applaud their efforts and I’m sure it brings smiles to their techy meterologist office friends but fails miserably for the average Joe who can only afford an older computer or cell phone and baseline internet bandwith who is looking out his window at ominous clouds waiting and waiting while an over the top website tries and tries to load the maps that will give him comfort. The old flash system worked well for him and I can understand why it had to go.  The NWS mission is to serve the interests of their constituents, not their techy meteorologist inclinations. They would serve more people like me if they would give us a quick to load dumbed down version.

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Well, ironically, one of the things I liked about the new site when it was in its test phase was that it was the only one of the bunch I’d seen that does not (much) bog down my Acer Swift 1 laptop, whose name is also ironic, as it’s about as fast as my 2008 Core 2 Duo laptop (quite slow by modern standards).

The new NWS radar site is not a heavyweight page that is slow because it tries to do too much… in the times when it is slow, I can use my Dell G3 (a speedy laptop) and it’s no better than it is on the Swift.

When the site is bogging down, it’s because (according to the article I linked in the myriad posts above) the NWS decided to host their own radar data web servers at the same time they switched over from the Flash site, and have apparently still not gotten it right. I’d have hoped that by now they would have it all straightened out, but it clearly isn’t. I haven’t been impacted by the slowness as badly as some, as often I have found it quite responsive and usable, but I definitely have seen what all the complaints are about on more than a few occasions, where it has been so slow that I would not bother with it and would go elsewhere if I were not trying to see just how slow it was.

In other words, even if they had a really light version of the radar site, it would still be bogged down at the server level, if it was hosted at the same site as the “full” radar site (which it probably would be). Most of the time when the site is bogging down, your computer (or other device) is waiting for the site to send you the data you requested. The initial page load is pretty decent, but for some reason getting the visual radar data (after you zoom in or enable the animation) to load is ponderously slow sometimes.

The NWS isn’t just providing data to non-meteorologists like you and I. It’s also the source of the data that actual meteorologists use, so they are also trying to provide the information that they need to do their jobs. If you’ve ever seen some of the more in-depth pages the NWS provides, it’s just a ton of information you can get from them, for free (because we’ve already paid for it in our taxes).

It was not that long ago that NWS didn’t provide much information directly to regular people. They would issue weather warnings, advisories, watches, etc., and other informational products, which would be parsed and the relevant bits disseminated by radio and TV stations. Their forecast discussions would go generally to other (non-NWS) meteorologists, whether at airports, TV stations, or anywhere else that might need one, and the legacy of how this was done (by teletype) is still visible in how the feeds are structured and in the abbreviations used. Most regular users would find these wholly unusable.

The radar feeds you’d see on the various TV stations, of course, came from the NWS too. With no internet, there was no reasonable way for regular people to get all of the info they have without the news media as a delivery mechanism. Now they have the dual role of providing direct info to end users and in providing data they’ve collected or computed to other professional meteorologists.

 

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The new NOAA radar interface has been a big disappointment for me because of the intermittent slow and incomplete loads. Performance has been worse when the weather is bad, just when I need it.

NOAA does produce some fast, light weight radar images. Perhaps some of these will be useful as we wait to see if NOAA can fix the performance of the new radar interface:  Here are a few examples:

1) Very compact gifs, static and loops, mostly organized by radar station, stored at:
https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite
Example: New York area, most recent image
https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/KOKX_0.gif
Example: New York area, loop
https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/KOKX_loop.gif

2) Compact gifs, static and loops, organized by region with a simple interface:
Example: northeast region
https://aviationweather.gov/radar/plot?region=alb

3) Weather and hazards data viewer. Generally fast loading with a useful interface:
Example:  national map, choose location and layer options
https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/map

I’ve learned a lot by reading this thread, thanks to all.

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Thanks for the response immediately above for the links. So the NWS does have quick loading animated radar that the average Joe could use!  The problem is that they gave it to the aviation industry, not the average Joe.  I wish I had been redirected to that website rather than the complicated one when the flash version ended! If they had done that I and so many others wouldn’t be so disgusted and said to he** with this, I’ll find another service.

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If you really want to see how (non-NWS) professionals do it, go to
https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/nexrad/

Click on the little man in the square in the upper top left corner of the display (“Radar Selection”) then select the radar in the state you want.  You can start a loop using the button down in the lower right corner of the radar display.

The menu on the left allows  you to select various display parameters.  Explanation of these parameters can be had by going to
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/data-access/radar-data/nexrad-products

All of this is produced from the official NEXRAD radar data and shows what can be the result of utilization of efficient radar display software.

A national radar display can be had by going to
https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/?parms=continental-conus-comp_radar-24-0-100-1&checked=map&colorbar=undefined

Moderator edit: Removed HTML. Please paste only into the editor Text tab.

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zat_so, Ascaris

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I’m not a fan of the new site and I really hate that they got rid of the GIF loops.  I do digital marketing for a chain of garden centers.  We used to have the radar loops as part of our in-store displays along with the local forecast.  They would just retrieve the newest image from the NWS site every 30 minutes.  For example, radar.weather.gov/lite/N0R/RLX_loop.gif  Folks really miss the radar loops.  We would also have the loop embedded in the dashboard in the control room of our 25 acre greenhouse facility.

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Is this what you are looking for?

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

NWS GIFs still available.

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Ascaris

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Thank you!!!!!  The animated GIF is what I missed most.

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The NWS site is an abomination. It is only good for getting one single view of the entire nation.
…..
If you want to see what a good weather radar site looks like (and no, I have zero connection with the site or its owners/managers; just a civilian here), look at a site created and maintained by private industry, which *has* to have viewers/ eyeballs, in order to make a profit (A local leading TV station); a site showing the whole nation or as much or little as you wish by zooming, quick, in and out; Cheers!!! (Scroll to its page bottom for the big national/regional radar; move in over your hometown; the whole nation, not just Texas or Dallas)
…..
https://www.wfaa.com/radar

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anonymous wrote:

Confirming the above:  As of 2021-01-26, composite radar is still miserably slow and clumsy:  a high-bandwidth product running on low-speed servers, apparently.  See the NWS Anchorage page (www.weather.gov/afc/radarpage) to see their mea culpa and explanation.

Other comments here indicate different experiences, which – since the NWS itself acknowledges a problem – suggests that those experiencing fast load times are perhaps looking at a “lite” or preview product and not the primary imaging product.

It would not be astonishing to me if it were the case that commercial intermediaries (private weather services) have a separate pipeline for getting NWS weather data, and that the product being made available to the public is inferior – by design or merely by convenient neglect – in a way that economically advantages those intermediaries.

 

agree, its a pos

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hard to believe this POS NWS radar site has still not been fixed. its been two years…

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Even on a super-fast university network the NWS radar products are often unusable. Especially so, it seems, when severe weather is widespread in populous regions.

No private company would stay in business with such products. They’re pretty much awful.

 

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SkipH

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