New Radar App

Hi all,

A few weeks ago I started looking, again, for a simple/fast app to view Radar images. Although I found some great apps out there, they didn't really do what I wanted, which was just showing me the Radar, and to be honest, while someof those apps have a lot of features, many of them, like the "Weather Channel" app, are just too "Whiz Banging" for me. Too many buttons and icons and screens and advertisements.

So... I spent a some time creating my own "Radar App". It's designed more for the outdoors enthusiast who wants to keep an eye on approaching storms.

Right now it only shows the short range "Base Radar" and "Composite Radar" images. There are other radar images, like "Relative Motion" and "Precipitation", and I'll make an different app that includes all of those, but this one is meant to be simple and fast, no extraneous crap, just the latest radar images showing storms (or lack thereof).

My tests show it to be faster than the NOAA radar page. This is mostly because they add a ton of stuff on their page that I don't. And, you can switch from viewing the latest "Base Radar" to the latest "Composite Radar" instantly.

The app uses the radar images directly from the NOAA webservers (they make them available specifically for this purpose), you can select any NOAA radar station in the U.S. (including Alaska and Hawaii) and it shows most of the layers they provide including:

Topo Map
Rivers
Highways
County Borders
Latest Radar Image
Legend
Warnings

This "Web App" will run in most web browsers on your Desktop, Laptop, iPhone, iTouch, iPad, Android phones and most Tablets and Netbooks.

It requires a network connection, so if you're out of range and can't make a phone call or access the web, you probably can't use the app either.

I haven't thought of a catchy name for the app yet, but you can find it here:

Bill's Radar App

It is, of course, free. And I'll be making some changes and adding some features to it, so it's not completely finished yet, but there's enough there to make it useful right now.

If you use it, please let me know what you think of it, good or bad.

Kindest Regards,

Bill Stephenson

Bill, as a NOAA ham radio weather spotter, I can tell you a "down and dirty" radar app would be very useful.
Some thought after looking at yours:
1) Dallas/Ft. Worth wasn't on your list.
2) Here is what I use on my iPhone while in the field:
http://www.corad.org/
http://www.w5tux.com/ (a bunch of screens)
http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=75115

Good luck on your app!

Thanks for the feedback!

The corad site puts the NOAA radar page in a frame, but it adds some good links and has the NOAA radio linked. I like that.

The w5tux site is cool. Lots of info there, and they've got animated radar. I'll be working on that soon. NOAA keeps the last 20 images there to make that easier. I liked the lightning strikes feature too. I don't know where they get that data yet. I don't think NOAA has it, but I'm just getting started on this

wunderground is awesome! Lots of cool stuff there.

BTW, I got all the listings from the NOAA site, and Dallas was there, but it was listed as "Spinks AP/Dallas-Ft Worth, TX" Don't know what "Spinks AP" is, but I removed it from the listing and moved it up in the alphabetical order.

I think I'll probably change that selection list to display radars by State. It's too hard to find what you're looking for as it is. NOAA has that list too, but I'll double check for Dallas after I grab it

Right now the app looks great in the iPhone emulator. The iPad needs some tweaking and it displays a little wonky on my Android phone too, but a couple taps there resizes it perfectly. I'll iron out that kind of stuff soon.

I really want to get the animation figured out first. I'm pretty sure I can do it with a c-code library called "GD", but I'd like to do it with CSS. I just haven't found any example code for that yet. Can't be that hard...

You're a "Spotter"? Cool!!

You have to get up on a ridge somewhere to spot any weather coming around here. There are a few places around I've stopped and sat and watched big storms from. Never seen any twisters yet though.

I listen to NOAA radio on my walkie-talkie all the time when I'm on our boat, and I have one in my bedroom with S.A.M.E. and an alarm on it. These storms we've had around here lately are pretty scary. Joplin was really scary.

I admire all you spotters. Really. They were tracking that Joplin storm from Oklahoma before it hit Joplin, through Joplin, then south of Springfield to past Taneyville with eye witness reports the entire time. It's hard to imagine how many more people might have been hurt if the spotters hadn't been out there. I was hunkered down in a basement that evening listening to their reports.

It looks very cool. It didn't bring northern / interior Alaska or Juneau, but Anchorage / Kenai and Valdez do show up.

Very nice Bill!

Yup, a spotter for three cities in southern Dallas county under the RACES (radio amateur civil emergency service)network. We activate when weather is in the area and provide eyeballs for the NWS to confirm what they are actually seeing or report things they aren't. We have to attend a Skywarn weather school every two years and its a ton of fun. A "spotter" is not a "chaser" however, so we don't go looking for weather.
Some of the super dedicated spotters have radar in their vehicles....W5TUX has his own mobile radar. I've got internet, windspeed, barometric pressure, and full ham HF/UHF/VHF communications in my car. I'm sure there are counterparts in your area, Bill.

Thanks!

I redid the selection list to display radars by State. It says Alaska has these sites:

Bethel
Fairbanks
Kenai
King Salmon
Middleton Is.
Nome
Sitka

I tested it and some of them said they were down.

There were more sites for AK on that list though, so I have some cleaning up work to do on that to make sure all the names display as expected. Off to the boat now (now I have an excuse to use my app )

I've gotten a little more done on my "Radar" app.

You can now view animated Radar images and see your location on the maps.

The location feature is iffy. I show the accuracy in meters, but I haven't tested it enough to know how good it's really working. I'll keep pecking at it though.

From my desktop I can get it to show a general location when I use the Firefox web browser, but my Safari browser doesn't seem to actually send location data to my app, so it just hangs there and doesn't show anything at all

You can try it out here:

http://navigraphic.com/baseRadar.html

If you test it, I'd sure appreciate it if you'd tell me how it works for you.

Thanks!!

Looks good on my HTC Droid (google). After I tell it to share my location, it takes me to Springfield. No big deal. Can,t tell how accurate my location is because there are too many blue dots all over the place. Does this thing make rain happen?

Thanks for the feedback!

Springfield is the default location. It doesn't select the map based on your mobile devices's location (yet), you have to select it after it loads the first time. I'll probably put a screen in front of the radar screen that asks you to select the radar site you want to view, and add some other options there as well.

One thing I can do is add a "Preferences" screen that lets you select your home base radar and have the app load that by default.

Your location is displayed with this graphic:

There are so many colors on that radar image when there's a storm that I had to make that graphic pretty big. I'll make a prettier one later.

The "Make it Rain" feature will be coming soon. After that, I'll add the "Make it Stop" feature, but that will be on the "Pro" version that you have to pay big bucks for

It is actually very easy to figure out as is. Just giving my initial response on that. Still waiting for the clouds to go away so I can see the map though. Dancing around a campfire at 9,000 ft. usually makes it rain, maybe you should work on the no rain first.

The dancing/ campfire thing works good at 6,000 ft. too, but you just have to plan it around when you are trying to cook dinner for it to work consistently at that elevation.

Sure, we have spotters here, and I've seen the classes advertised to become one.

I kind of figured that you all had a designated location to look out from for a specific area, but that's only a guess. Now I imagine that you can be about anywhere and report if needed or activated.

Since you have internet, maybe my little app would be of use to you too then when you're mobile. It really should be at least a bit faster than the standard NOAA radar web page

NOAA has a very bare bones mobile web app. It has a national radar view that I might incorporate into my app. You can find it here:

http://mobile.weather.gov/

The small images are pretty much worthless for old eyes like mine, but the hi-res images are the same as the ones I'm using.

It's really cool that they make them available, and they've got great resources on how to use them and how to interpret the radar images themselves.

Once I found this page:

http://forecast.weather.gov/jetstream/doppler/ridge_download.htm

I had to start coding my own app. All that cool stuff, it's like picking cherries

Looks like it is coming along nicely, on my Droid X. Cool beans.

Thanks I.B!

It's needs some work on the display code, and I haven't been able to get to that these past few weeks, but I'll be working on it again soon, and adding some features to boot.

Sweet. Im always up for a cool new app. I have been known to donate for free apps, and have no issues paying for a really great app. I will be checking in on this thread from time to time now.

I updated the app this afternoon.

I worked on making it display better, and zoom in and out better. It's still not as good as I'd like, and could be a lot better on an iPad, but it still should be a lot better than it was because it was pretty wonky on an Android

I also hooked up the "Refresh" button so you can get the latest images easier now.

I added a couple more features to the app today:

The first is a weather forecast feature. Right now it only shows the current forecast for your current location.

The other feature is a sort of Poor Man's "SPOT" (I imagine it might draw some howls here, but I think it has the potential to be handy).

You can send an "I'm Okay" email to an email address you've pre-entered, and you can also send an "I NEED HELP" email.

Both types of emails can be sent with just a couple taps, and both allow you to enter an optional message. Both will include your Lat/Long as well.

Tap the "Home" link on the top left of the screen to access these features. The Email features will not work unless you've entered valid "To" and "From" email addresses.

You can find the app here:

http://navigraphic.com/

Very cool stuff Bill. I wish I had the smart phone to use it on.

Hi-

W5TUX is my amateur radio call sign as well as my weather site for DFW (Dallas-Ft Worth) Texas. I would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Rick

Hi Rick, and welcome to the Forum!

What kind of weather site are you talking about? I'd love to hear more about it.

I'm really a rank amateur when it comes to weather (meteorology) and really only playing around with the concept of an app that would be useful to backpackers. If you've got any suggestions I'd love to hear them too.

Great Bill, now I need to start wearing my aluminum foil hat again. Its not so much the aluminum foil turban as the grounding chain that gets attention! I don't know how you get the power to run a radar anyway while camping I suppose you could hang your food from a stick and put it the radar beam to cook it. Maybe it could buzz if Sasquatch sneaks up on my camp? Hey theres a use for ya...
Jim

No, no, don't break out your aluminum foil hat again. That's old school anyway. What you want is a Hi-Tech Carbon Fiber hat with a Dish on top so you can focus the radar on a Sasquatch that comes into your camp.

I read that's "what all the Sasquatch hunters have been missing".

Or did they say "what all the Sasquatch hunters have that have been missing"?

I can't remember, but in either case, that's apparently what you need to detect a Sasquatch.