RADAR Drop-Out At High dBz
-
I was monitoring a thunderstorm in Alberta, Canada today and noticed that when it reached high dBz levels -- it seems to have peaked with values in the 65 to 70 dBz range -- the high reflectivity core was dropped on Windy's RADAR display.
You can see it on the thunderstorm southwest of Edmonton in the attached photo. This was around 23:20Z on May 31, 2023.
Not sure if this is a scale issue or what, but it would be nice for Windy's display to catch the real strong ones as well!
Here's the relevant scan of the same storm in Radarscope with the strongest core highlighted.
Let me know if any other information is needed. Thanks!
-
@WeatherInThePeg Thank you for reporting this. I've checked the data and it seems that our source (GeoMet WMS) might be cutting the data of. This is what we see from Fort McMurray radar at 2023-06-01 06:00UTC (with missing data in the center of storm)
and this is source image it was created from (with missing data in the same place)
Data from different source do not contain this missing data but contain a lot of other unwanted features (ground, lakes, center cross) that complicate processing:
I'll contact Meteorological Service of Canada and try to resolve this issue. In the meantime, we'll switch to the other source -
@Filip_K Thanks for looking into that. Seems like their colour scale doesn't go high enough, and unfortunately their "Max Value" colour is the same as the background and gets cut when removing the background for transparency. Oops! (I'd be lying if I hadn't made similarly obvious mistakes when programming things myself that seemed blindingly obvious in retrospect).
I definitely recommend getting in touch with the MSC; seems like a easy problem to fix (e.g. just use a different off the scale colour) and from the people I've talked to, external requests get a lot more attention than internal ones. :-)
I've just be re-exploring Windy after not really checking it out for a couple years, and I'm very impressed with what you've built up. It's a fantastic application and I look forward to seeing the ways it continues to grow.
Thanks for the quick response to the problem and I hope that a solution doesn't take too long to get implemented (on the MSC's side). I personally much prefer the higher quality tiles they serve via WMS on the GeoMet than their pre-made imagery.
-
@WeatherInThePeg We're currently serving from the other source (called Datamart), which is also MSC. The spacial resolution is the same (1km grid) and image delay is much smaller (less than 2 minutes compared to at least 10 from WMS).
I already got reply from MSC regarding the issue and it should be fixed in next WMS release, but I don't know when it will be.
But because of the smaller delay, we'll probably stick with Datamart
-
@Filip_K Just checking with afternoon convection today in southern Saskatchewan and the change in data feed is working well. Cell up to 68 dBz with no drop-outs.
https://community.windy.com/post/145434
