News page: RAP Real-Time Weather

Site News

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.

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.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a major facility sponsored by the National Science Foundation and managed by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research.
Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.