| Site News |
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12/18/2024 - Image generation server upgrade Our image generation server will be offline for 2-3hrs beginnng at 3pm MT (22:00Z). This will prevent the production of all radar, satellite, and upper-air plots. This update is being made as part of our regular security upgrades, and to improve the reliability of the image generation services. Thank you for your patience during this brief outage. |
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06/10/2024 - New Orleans (KLIX) radar moved to Hammond (KHDC) The WSR-88D NEXRAD radar known as KLIX in New Orleans was moved to Hammond, LA, and renamed KHDC. Our radar image generation and background maps were updated to reflect its new location and name. |
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03/11/2024 - HTTPS security upgrade Starting March 18, 2024, all page, image, and data requests will be served over HTTPS (SSL) only. Any requests to http protocol will receive a client-side redirect 301 to load the content over https. This change is being made to bring our website into compliance with UCAR web security practices. Web browsers should handle this transparently, but please update any scripts or application clients to pull our content from https from now on. |
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10/27/2023 - Data ingest server maintenance The servers which receive and preprocesses all incoming data will be upgraded on Friday October 27th from 12pm to 3pm MT. Please expect that some gridded data will be unavailable during that time. Most data should be backfilled after the interruption. |
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3/18/2023 - Switched GOES-W to GOES-18 The Hawaii and Alaska satellite imagery is now generated from the new GOES-W satellite, GOES-18. The older GOES-W satellite, GOES-17, has been decommissioned. |
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2/23/2022 - Data ingest server maintenance The server which receives and preprocesses all incoming data will be down for hardware maintenance on Wednesday February 23rd from 9am to 11am MT. No data will be processed during that time, but we expect that some data will backfill after the interruption. |
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9/13/2021 - Updated Level II radar processing The Level II radar image processing on the Radar page was completely refactored to use the Py-ART toolkit. While the output imagery is nearly identical, this update resolves processing problems that were causing the old images to be consistently late. |
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8/26/2021 - Removed deprecated applets All Java applets have been removed from the Surface page. This includes the METARs Java applet and the Tornado alley overlays. Support for Java Applets was dropped from all major browsers a few years ago over concerns about the security of the Netscape Plugin API. The only major browser that still supported it was Windows Internet Explorer, but it has become unreliable lately, so we are removing the applet-enabled features altogether. An interactive Java application for viewing METARs is still available as the Flight Path Tool, for those willing to install a desktop Java app. |
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8/10/2021 - New Satellite microphysics plots The Satellite pages have been updated with 3 new plots:
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1/20/2021 - New Level II radar plots The Radar pages have been updated from Level III to Level II. The NEXRAD Level II data are at the higher native resolution, providing significantly more detail than the Level III data under all scanning strategies. The new plots display the same fields that were available in the previous version. Range folding in the velocity field is rendered in purple, as before. The national base reflectivity mosaic is still available as a Contiguous US plot or higher-resolution regional plots. The lightning plots, which were only available internally to UCAR, have been removed. That proprietary data is available from other sources. |
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11/13/2020 - Upper-Air Skew-Ts and RAwindsonde OBservations updated The Upper-Air pages have been updated with new rawinsonde and Skew-T plots. The new content is generated using the SHARPpy sounding package. CONUS Winds/Temps plots have also been upgraded to the new RAOBS processing. The raw RAOBS data in WMO text format can still be downloaded from the updated path, https://weather.rap.ucar.edu/data/upper/Current.rawins, however this source and format is being phased out. Regular users are encouraged to migrate to an operational RAOBS data source, such as the NWS Telecommunications Gateway via Unidata's Internet Data Distribution system. Users are also encouraged to switch to the BUFR encoding. The text version will be removed at a future date. |
11/12/2020 - Satellite imagery updated for GOES-16 and GOES-17 The Satellite images have been updated to use the new GOES-16 (East) and GOES-17 (West) regional imagery. The size of the images has been increased to take advantage of the increased resolution of the new satellites. New combinations of wavelengths also have been generated to take advantage of the additional bands. The new images provide better detection of atmospheric phenomena such as icing and nighttime convection. More details are available on the satellite help page. |
8/25/2020 - Site maintenance Minor site maintence was performed to remove broken links, update Terms of Use, Copyrights, and Contacts, and fix several web page bugs. |
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Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.