Our RadView project is an effort to get real time NWS NEXRAD information into GIS applications. We are currently arriving at solutions from a variety of angles and are looking for public interest in this dataset. Please contact us if you are at all interested...

Data provided from this service is for educational purposes only. Errors can and do happen.

News:

• 28 Apr 2004: Release the NIDS 2 GIS application.
• 26 Apr 2004: Add in links for the nationwide composites of NTP (storm total precip) and N1P (1 hour precip)!
• 13 Jan 2004: Release the nationwide composite WMS!
• 16 Sep 2003: Add US base reflectivity, remove Iowa NTP product.
• 04 Jul 2003: The composite base reflectivity plot has been greatly improved. The geo-referencing is nearly perfect!
• 01 Jul 2003: Initial release to the public.

NEXRAD + Mapserver Howto:

Here is a HOWTO on generating NEXRAD composites with GEMPAK and then displaying them in Mapserver. Feedback is certainly welcome.

Geo-referenced Images:

Using geo-referenced images is probably the simpliest way of getting data into your GIS. Displaying timestamps and color bars are tricky business. The following URLs contain pure RASTER data layers.

RADAR	EPSG Proj Code	Data Files	World File
US Base Reflectivity (N0R) Composite (generated every 5 minutes)	4326 (Lat-Lon)	PNG format 8bit TIFF	Decimal Degree Units
US Storm Total Precip (NTP) Composite (generated every 5 minutes)	4326 (Lat-Lon)	PNG format 8bit TIFF	Decimal Degree Units
US 1 Hour Precip (N1P) Composite (generated every 5 minutes)	4326 (Lat-Lon)	PNG format 8bit TIFF	Decimal Degree Units
KCCI-TV SuperDoppler (generated every 2-3 minutes)	26915 UTM Zone 15N	PNG format 8bit TIFF	Meters

Web Map Service (WMS):

WMS is a neat way to pull in images into your GIS, if your GIS can act as a WMS client. Describing WMS is beyond the scope of this page, but we have set up a WMS on our webserver. Point your WMS aware client at

http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/wms/radar.php?

for Iowa imagery in EPSG: 26915 (NAD83 / UTM Zone 15N)
-or
Base Reflectivity:   http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/nexrad/n0r.cgi?
1 Hour Rainfall:   http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/nexrad/n1p.cgi?
Storm Total Rainfall:   http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/cgi-bin/wms/nexrad/ntp.cgi?

for United States imagery in EPSG: 4326 (unprojected lat-lon)

Note: The WMS service should be able to send back an image in the projection of your choice. This has worked during the limited testing done in house.

There are many free web WMS clients available on the Internet. Recently, ESRI has released an OGC extension supporting WMS for their free client called ArcExplorer. After downloading ArcExplorer, you will want to also download the Interoperability Extension. ESRI has also released an extension for ArcIMS!

Notes and Caveats:

1. The storm total precipitation (NTP) product does not directly composite. Each NEXRAD site reports the value for a different timespan. Basically, once the radar detects rain, it will begin to accumulate the rainfall in the NTP product. Once it stops raining for an hour, the value is reset to zero. Since all sites reset at different times, you see the issue.