Iowa Environmental Mesonet

Iowa State University Department of Agronomy

Over 1 billion observations collected

Recent NIDS Imagery to GIS RASTERs

The form allows you to generate a Geo-referenced TIFF or JPEG from most any NIDS product from NEXRAD sites near Iowa. The archive contains NIDS products back 10 days. If you would like products prior to this date, please contact us.

1. Select NEXRAD site:

2. Select NIDS Product:

3. Select Date (UTC):

Tips/Tricks/Caveats:

  • Once you have made all of your selections, a zip file will be made available for you to download. This zip file will contain the TIFF image and a .tfw world file, which geo-references the image.
  • Legends/Scalebars. I am really not sure how to resolve this needed meta-data to make sense of the imagery. I would be happy to hear some ideas.
  • Option 4 presents available volume scans for the date of choice. The value listed in parenthesis is the size of the NIDS data file. When you are looking at the Storm Total (NTP) product, the size value is important to note when the size goes from larger values to smaller values between 2 volume scans. This is when the RADAR NTP product was reset to zero.
  • Some of you may wish to write scripts against this service. Here is a template for the URL./request/gis/nids2gis.php?rad=ABR&prod=N0R&fp=N0R_20040426_0005 . You do need to know the volume scan times before making a request from a script.