The Weather Radar Composite Is Growing Across Europe And the World!
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As we all know, one of the most popular features on Windy.com is the 'Radar, lightning' overlay.
- Weather radar, also called Doppler weather radar or Weather surveillance radar (WSR), is a reflectivity measurement device used to locate precipitation, calculate its motion, and estimate its type (rain, snow, hail etc.) or amount of predictable water in clouds. Returned echoes from targets ("reflectivity") are analyzed for their intensities to establish the precipitation rate in the scanned volume.
Its development on Windy.com has always been a work to continue:
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Initially, our radar layer was covering the USA (including Hawaii and coastal parts of Alaska), South Korea and a couple of islands in the North Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.
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In June 2018, we added a number of European countries from Spain to Finland.
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In August 2018, more and more weather radars in various countries were added: in southern part of Canada, in Caribbean, Colombia, Nicaragua, Argentina, Estonia, Italy and Greece.
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In September 2018, this feature reached a completely new level by adding new flashing icons representing real-time lightning strikes, and even thunder sound effect. Therefore, this popular feature got a brand new name: "Radar, lightning".
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Please note: Although the weather radar and the lightning radiolocation are both integrated into one overlay, they work independently of each other; they have different data sources and a slightly different map coverage. However, on this feature, they share the timeline occurrence; you can display them together as an animation in the time course of 12 hours to 5 mins back in the past.
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Check the awesome video presentation above.
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In February 2019, a number of new countries across Europe and the world were added into the weather radar composite, our main data source being RainViewer.com.
- Kudos to @dzuremar, our backend guru, who did a splendid job on it:
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@Marienka I hope rainviewer knows that you grab the data 😏
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@Tomber42 Of course ! I have exchanged a couple of emails with Oleksii already. He did a lot of hard work to cover such a huge area and is always very helpful. Plus his API is easy to use. Hopefully next client version will display credit for Rainviewer.com (like Blitzortung.org for example).
We still prefer our own handling of radar sources, especially raw data, but it's a huge amount of work. So Rainviewer at this moment covers the additional countries that were added in the past 2 weeks. Our original cover that has been here since last summer hasn't changed (USA + most of Europe).
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Nice job on adding more radars!! However, when will sites like blitzortung.org REALLY improve so that more lightning can be displayed, such as the African countries, more of China and India, South America, the IntraTropical Convergence Zone?(ITCZ)? Sometimes we do see lightning in hurricanes, which is cool, even out in the mid-oceans. I do notice that the radar precipitation doesn't show as much precipitation as some other sites do, like Weather Underground, for example. It does seem to be a fairly accurate radar. Keep on adding more countries and radars!! Maybe the imagery will improve. Wintry precip should also be added.
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@weatherfan said in The Weather Radar Composite Is Growing Across Europe And the World!:
However, when will sites like blitzortung.org REALLY improve so that more lightning can be displayed, such as the African countries, more of China and India, South America, the IntraTropical Convergence Zone?(ITCZ)?
Improvements in coverage will become available when users will add more lightening receivers in those areas.
Cover Your Area: http://en.blitzortung.org/cover_your_area.php
