United States Weather Radar Data Feed or API?

Question

Is there a government or private API for accessing weather radar data in the United States?

Answer 1

NOAA has a SOAP API: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/

Several private APIs are listed here:

http://www.programmableweb.com/apis/directory/1?apicat=Weather

Answer 2

I was looking for radar data awhile back to overlay on a google map. This site offers it for free and they provide some sample code to get started for google maps and some other online maps:

IEM Open GIS Consortium

The map tiles they provide are not limited to radar and as far as I can tell they are all free to use.

Answer 3

Radarmatic has a JSON API at http://radarmatic.com/api.html

Update: link broken, project no longer active

Answer 4

You can get images updated every three minutes from NWS RIDGE. It's not really an API -- just images sitting in a directory -- but the naming convention and structure of the images is fully documented.

Answer 5

A better way to apprach this would be to use the "Weather and Climate Toolkit" offered at : The Weather and Climate Toolkit homepage.

The software can batch process raw radar data - and you can get just about anything you want this way if you are able to place it on your map after processing. It can export in JSON, geoTIF and some other formats. If you want more options for your app/project, this is the easiest way to do it - as you can get rain, snow, hail, wind velocity, dual polarization products, etc quite easily once you learn your way around the software.

Weather radar data feed from every WSR-88D radar site comes in 2 raw forms : Level-2 and Level-3. Level 2 data ("super resolution" and base data) is available from the Amazon AWS servers (NEXRAD on AWS) and level-3 data is available from the NWS server at This link from the Radar Operations Center.