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Comment by superkuh | Hacker News Reader

Backed away from? They never even fixed the 'lite' version so that you could actually use the radar images to predict when it will rain (the image is so tiny it's useless: https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/CONUS_loop.gif). During the transition period years I must have sent a dozen emails to the noaa people asking them to please keep a simple animated radar image of CONUS available. It would be an easy thing. But they're absolutely dedicated to web application only access to weather data.

And the most frustrating thing is that the links to the https://radar.weather.gov/ 'lite' version are only visible if you sucessfully execute JS. So the no-JS version is invisible to no-JS browsers. Whoever they had designing this front end had never heard of graceful degredation, let alone progressive enhancement. It remains an accessibility nightmare.

Weather.gov 2.0 will be more of the same.

View on HN

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/CONUS-LARGE_loop.gi... is quite a bit bigger.

I usually use the local radar gif though. My local office forecast pages link to the lite radars.

It's straightforward to take a peak at the available gifs:

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/

I'll be... the finally did it. Thanks for the update!

Thank you for starting the thread that eventually produced the answer I've been looking for this whole time.

And thank you for being persistent about raising awareness about how useful that national loop is.

Thank you!

> fixed the 'lite' version so that you could actually use the radar images to predict when it will rain ...

Those are the wrong links for that purpose. What you want is e.g.

https://radar.weather.gov/station/knkx/standard

Reach these by scrolling down your local forecast.weather.gov e.g.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=32.95528450000...

This is not what is wanted. What's wanted is the better options that previously existed. You've pointed to an often useless but in the best case substantially worse option.

This isn't difficult. Keep the better thing running and run the new showy thing in parallel for whomever wants that.

I don't get these criticisms, radar.weather.gov is phenomenally great! It works on all devices and doesn't show Ads. Maybe all these negative comments are people who work at accuweather or other for money weather sites trying to disparage radar.weather.gov with fabricated nonsensical garbage.

It's a degradation from what previously existed. We want the better thing that already existed, not this worse thing.

pre-Trump, knowledgeable netizens could access data directly, in large quantities since Federal data is already paid for by taxpayers. Things seem to have changed now that $MONEY is to be made in intermediating weather data feeds?

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