Current Weather

Weather is the fastest thing this map draws. The ocean layers come from forecasts rebuilt every few hours and published here hourly; the radar behind this page is the National Weather Service’s own service, asked for by your browser as you look at it, and its mosaics are rebuilt about every two minutes. Press Play and the last two hours run in about twenty seconds, or drag the slider to a scan and read the time beside it.

The three layers answer different questions and are worth reading together. The wind is a forecast — where the air is going, at 10 m, from the ECMWF open data at a quarter degree. The air temperature at 2 m is from the same run and shows the fronts the wind is blowing across. The radar is not a forecast at all: it is a measurement of what is falling, now, and it is the only layer on this map that owes nothing to a model.

The radar reaches the United States and its territories, and nowhere else. It is five regional mosaics — the continental states, Alaska, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Guam — so over the open ocean the layer is blank because there is no radar there, not because the weather is clear. The readout beside the slider says none in view when you have panned outside coverage, because those two are not the same thing and a blank map cannot tell you which it means.

Everything else the map can draw is one switch away, including the ocean underneath: sea-surface temperature, the currents, the gliders and floats working in that water. This page differs from the others only in what it opens with.