Radar Love

I am a big fan of digital signage, and my hardware and software of choice to deliver this is a Chromebit and Rise Vision, respectively. These are a powerful combination to bring displays to life in your organization.

One of the components most people want to incorporate into their signage is some basic weather information. There are scads of widgets for current conditions and forecasts. However, finding a customizable radar loop is a little more challenging.

For years my go-to choice for this was Weather Underground’s Full Screen Weather. It was great! Was…great…until they changed it. After a seemingly minor update it would no longer remember your location, zoom level, or other preferences if you embedded the map’s URL. I struggled for a long time to find a viable alternative, until today when I discovered a different way to embed weather radar!

This method still utilizes Weather Underground to deliver our content, but it leverages Nexrad radar images. These are not as elegant as the ones I had previously used, but they are still very functional and allow a number of customizations.

Here’s how to get started:

1. Go to www.wunderground.com
2. Type in your City & State in the search bar
3. Then find the link for Nexrad radar
4. Choose your options, zoom level, and animated frame rate (I found that 18 frames is close to a 1-hour loop)
5. Click on Save Image (this opens a new tab)
6. Copy that URL and use it to embed a real-time radar loop!

For example, the image you see below is embedded using this code: