Rain radar
An optional rain-radar overlay with nowcast frames for weather-sensitive operations.
Rain decides whether a stage can be loaded, whether a crane may lift and whether the audience heads for shelter. The rain radar adds an animated precipitation layer to the map, including a short forecast, so you can watch a shower approach the site and decide with the same screen you already use to run the day.
Turn it on#
- Open the map menu and find Rain radar in the base maps group.
- Switch it on. A small player bar appears on the map and the radar starts to loop.
- Switch it off again with the same switch, or with the x on the player bar.
Some instances offer two radar sources side by side, labelled Rain radar (KNMI) and Rain radar (Weerplaza). They are mutually exclusive: switching one on switches the other off, because both draw into the same layer. The Weerplaza one is the sharper of the two; the KNMI one uses open data.
The player bar#
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Play / pause | Starts or stops the loop. The loop pauses by itself while the app is in the background, so it does not use data or battery there. |
| Time slider | Drag to any frame. Doing so pauses the loop, and only the frame you land on is loaded. |
| Time label | The clock time of the frame on screen, marked as a forecast when it lies in the future. |
| x | Hides the radar and the bar. |
The layer opens on the frame nearest to the present moment, and the set of frames is refreshed every five minutes while the radar is on.
What the data is#
- Frames. Each frame is a five-minute step. The current radar picture is followed by a nowcast (a forecast built from the movement of the current rain) of about two hours ahead.
- Sources. Two Dutch weather sources are supported, the national weather institute's open radar forecast and a commercial nowcast known from consumer rain apps. Instances that only have one enabled simply show Rain radar. If the server cannot reach its source, the app falls back to a public global radar with fewer frames and a lower maximum zoom.
- Shared and cached. Radar images are fetched by the SCAD Maps server once and shared by everybody on the instance. A whole team watching the radar does not multiply requests to the weather provider.
For operators#
The radar is disabled by default and is enabled per instance, together with the choice of source and which sources appear in the menu. The settings are listed in Instance configuration. One of the two sources runs anonymously but is rate-limited by its provider unless an access key is configured; the other needs no key at all.