Radar Displays to be Replaced December 16th

The National Weather Service will be replacing its web-based radar displays with a new design on December 16th. The current address for this new radar display is:

https://preview-radar.weather.gov

NOTE: The existing radar pages (https://radar.weather.gov) remain operational; the preview page should not be used for operational feeds at this time. On December 16th, this web address will use the new display.

The original version of our radar pages is many years old, and utilizes the Adobe Flash software. Flash is being discontinued at the end of the year. The new radar displays are built using HTML 5 and JavaScript, which are used by current browsers.

Highlights of the new display:

Web-based and mobile-friendly displays
Uses Multi-Radar, Multi-Sensor (MRMS) datasets on an interactive map
Ability to download data in KML format
Contains several map layers that are Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) compliant
Ability to overlay long-fused (e.g. winter weather) and short-fused (e.g. severe weather) watches, warnings and advisories
Inclusion of several high-resolution radar product types

The customized display can be bookmarked for use. As such, there would be no specific web pages for each individual radar.

We have created a shortcut centered on central Illinois. It is available at: https://go.usa.gov/x7AS6 The different radar products can be selected by clicking on the "BREF.RAW" menu at the top left.

Following public comment periods over the summer, several fixes were applied to the new display:

Inability for some of the the map overlays to render correctly
Radar transparency levels when overlaying the watch/warning/advisory displays
Descriptions of radar product types have been clarified
Creation of GIF images to replace the existing images, for use in other web pages
Updated bookmarks to recent on a selected local radar