South England Rain Radar map goes blank
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Often, the very latest frame in the sequence of the rain radar map has no data is for the South of England. This behaviour has always happend occasionally but has become systematic more recently.
Motorola one vision Android 10
See enclosed images:
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@Dcampbell305
This is because the last frame of the radar loop has not been received in time from the radar provider. So it’s the previous image, but with stripes, which is shown.This issue occurs from time to time in different places. I don’t know if it is due to long dissemination lead time from the provider or a too long time for processing the data by Windy. That delays the last frame by 20 minutes.
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@idefix37 Thank you for explaining the issue. Arguably, It might be more useful to users to display the latest known good data for an area, even if old, rather than defaulting to no data if the latest set isn't ready?
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@dcampbell305
The latest known good data is the last image without stripes. So you would like that the striped image would not be shown? I agree this image brings nothing, only that the latest is missing. -
@idefix37 Old good data is always better than no data. However it's a real shame that the last tranche is now systematically missing from the map for the South of England area. It has forced me to start using other apps which, while more real time, are otherwise nowhere near as rich as Windy's offering. Any effort by Windy developers on this would probably be better focused on speeding up the data processing pipeline to ensure timely data update rather than artificially curtailing the display.
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@dcampbell305 Hello, there are no missing data anymore if you look at the UK radar.
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@korina I confirm everything is now working. Many thanks!!
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@dcampbell305 Hi, it seems that it was just temporary, data are in order at the moment.
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@dcampbell305 Hello, this means that there is some disruption and the latest image is not available, so the old image is displayed. For example now, radar has no issue.
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@korina but the old image is NOT displayed. Look at the screenshots I have uploaded. The lltest image is simply blank in large areas. The 2nd to last image has lots of data... This is a real problem.
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@korina Korina, just to show that this is a systematic problem, the following screenshots were taken from the browser version rather than the app.
You can clearly see that a whole storm system visible on the "2nd to last image" has simply disappeared off the "latest image" in the historical sequence. i.e it is simply not true that "The old image is displayed"
This happens systematically every time I use Windy. It really is not some rare event.
Browser screenshots:
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@korina Just to demonstrate my point, these images are of 21:45 and 21:50 BST Sunday 8th Aug. You can see again that a whole frontal system data has disappeared in the later image;
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@dcampbell305 Bump to stay current
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@dcampbell305 Hello, we will investigate it once it happens again.
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@korina Now that there is some active weather over England I can show the problem again.
The two attached images show the 2nd to last and last frame in the rain radar plot. You can clearly see that the 2nd to last frame has high activity, but this has disappeared in the last frame.
Data taken 20:31 and 20:40 8th September 2021
The problem seems to be due to the filtering algorithm. You have stated in the past "If the data is not ready, the last image is shown" This is clearly not happening correctly.
Note: This is from the browser version of Windy.com but the app shows identical images.
Damian Campbell
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@korina ...and finally just to show that the storm front was still there at 20:40 the enclosed image shows the data for 20:40 but logged at 21:15....
If you compare this image with the 20:40 image above, you can see there is a lot of data missing when 20:40 was the latest image..
Interestingly this issue really only seems to concern the South of England data sets. Data from other areas (e.g. Ireland, France) seem sound.
Damian Campbell
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@dcampbell305 Hello, we have made some changes and the radar visualization should not disappear anymore before its next update.
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@korina I confirm that the data is no longer lost on the last frame. Thank you for you efforts
However, this now shows that the time lag to obtain and display the latest rain data seems much longer than with other apps, e.g. the Met Office or The Weather Channel. Can anything be done to reduce this delay so that the rain radar data is more current?
