National Weather Service radar viewer

[ghost]

Existing weather radar apps aren't really suitable for advanced users/amateur meteorologists. All radar websites I have found either lack features or are (in typical web app fashion) bloated and slow.

The current solutions:

• radar.weather.gov - The official National Weather Service radar map. Before 2020, this was a lightweight page that displayed pre-rendered GIFs for each radar station and product. It wasn't the best, but it got the job done and was reliable. The new website displays the same pre-rendered images on an interactive map. The UI is very cumbersome and the site is EXTREMELY slow at times, preventing me from being able to see radar during an active tornado warning on two occasions.
• accuweather, wunderground, weatherbug - The top Google results for "weather radar". All lack features for advanced users.
• GRLevelX - The best option. Unfortunately it's quite old, is Windows-only (does not work via Wine), and costs $80 + $250 for the entire package.

An ideal handmade solution would:

• Display an error if radar sources are unavailable (not hard!)
• Render raw radar data instead of downloading pre-rendered images - improves resolution and decreases latency
• Display all available radar products, not just base reflectivity
• Display active watches/warnings
• Display real-time 3D radar

Details

The United States National Weather Service publishes raw NEXRAD Level 2/3 radar data for public use via AWS and via a few top-tier hosts like the University of Oklahoma.

• NEXRAD on NOAA.gov
• NEXRAD on Wikipedia
• Py-ART Python NEXRAD parser and renderer

NEXRAD Base Reflectivity scans are taken at multiple elevations by pitching the radar dish up and down, meaning 3D models can be constructed from radar data. I am not aware of any publicly-available radar viewer with this feature. GR2Analyst can do this with archival radar data, but not in real-time.

The NWS also publishes active and previous weather alerts via their web API, although the quality and reliability of the API is questionable: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

[bvisness]

I didn't even know 3D radar was a thing! This would indeed be cool to see. Real-time 3D radar data would on its own be a fantastic standout feature.