FORECAST dBZ
Live national radar, and the number under your finger.
Start here
FREE · NO ACCOUNT · U.S. GOVERNMENT SOURCESComposite Reflectivity
The strongest echo in any layer of the column — the radar picture everyone means by "the radar". A new scan about every two minutes, and three hours of it to run backwards.
Precipitation Rate & QPE
How hard it is falling right now, and how much has actually fallen over the last hour and the last day. The rate knows about hail and snow, not just reflectivity.
Hail, VIL and Echo Tops
The largest hail the column can support, the storm's total water mass, and how tall it has grown. Severe criteria is 25 mm, and the scale breaks there on purpose.
Rotation & Lightning
Where rotation has passed in the last two hours — the swath, not the instant — and cloud-to-ground strike density over the last five minutes.
Colour Scales
Every scale the viewer can draw, at the values it actually draws them — including the NEXRAD ramp you grew up with and a colourblind-safe one that survives being read as greyscale.
How it works
Where the data comes from, what the numbers mean, why the frames are stored the way they are — and what this site is not.
What makes it different
It tells you the number
Tap anywhere and the map reports the measured value — 51.4 dBZ, 38 kft, 25 mm of hail — not a colour you have to match against a legend by eye.
Built for the phone
The map is the page and the controls sit under your thumb, because radar gets read outdoors, one-handed, while deciding whether to move the car.
The map stays readable
Street-level OpenStreetMap underneath, and every place name drawn over the weather. A town buried under a 55 dBZ core has stopped being a town.
Your choice of scale
Four reflectivity ramps and two map themes, switchable instantly — because the colour is applied when the tile is drawn, not baked into the archive.
The network
Forecast Eagle
The forecast models behind the weather — RRFS, HRRR, GFS, NBM and the NWS's own NDFD grids, on maps that zoom.
weather.city
Weather for places — every city, county, interstate and airport in the country, and a few thousand things nobody else maps.
squall.cloud
Broadcast-quality GOES satellite and radar stills and loops, rendered for video and print rather than for a browser.