Frequently asked questions

1. How do I make a table of hourly rainfall observations from several stations?

Find the "Observations" link on any station plots page (with or without radar) and choose the desired field: 'hourly rain'. Select several stations on the map. This works best if the observations times are the same for all stations so 'MSC auto hourly' under the 'Map Stations' menu is a good choice.

2. What does the "toggle" on the radar animation pages do?

Pressing the toggle button flips between the latest image and the image one hour earlier (but check that!). Using the toggle shows the movement of the radar echoes over a one hour period and makes it easier to estimate the likely position an hour into the future. The one hour toggle is always anchored on the latest image but the earlier image can be chosen by pressing the "Loop/set toggle" button while the animation is stopped.

3. Why is spotwx limited to the weather station positions?

Spotwx takes any latitude/longitude position if you run it on its own but it can be useful to compare the actual weather as recorded by the station to the model predicted weather at the station as given by spotwx. Try choosing more than one station to see if the model forecast varies over your area.

4. I live near the US border. What about US observations?

I've included links (Links tab) to US weather data map plots provided by mesowest.utah.edu. Mesowest currently includes about 40,000 stations owned by a range of public and private organisations. Mesowest itself is "funded primarily" by the US National Weather Service. Adding some US ground station observations to the tools available on this site is on my to do list.

5. Why don't you have a radar display that pans and zooms like other weather radar sites?

Dropping the ability to zoom in or out makes loading the web pages faster, more reliable and easier on my $300 web server. I've assumed that most people most of the time are mainly interested in just their own locality so a large scale map shouldn't be required. Severe weather analysis such as identifying supercell storms requires zoomed in imagery of Doppler radial velocity data or related algorithms but these are not provided by EC/MSC free to the public, as far as I know.

6. How do I look up a particular station?

Go to the View menu and choose the station centered view (the 2nd option). Open the stations search form in the Move menu. Search for the name (preferably one word) and select the station from the list. Choose "All weather stations" in the "Stations" menu and zoom in. Click the dot to see the latest observations. Add the "date/time form" from the View menu for older observations.

7. I'm trying to estimate the 24 hour rainfall total for a location that does not have a weather station. How can I interpolate between stations?

Run a radar animation. Here's an example from July 8 2023.
• Use the "faster" button once or twice to speed up the animation.
• Choose 'Map Stations'/'MSC auto hourly' and select a few stations. Look under the rain (r1hr) and precipitation headings (p1hr).
• Use the 'Show running totals' link shown above the observations table.
• More stations can be added to the map by selecting 'Rain: MSC, prov forestry' or 'All weather stations' in the 'Map stations' menu.
• From the Scan menu, choose the '24 hour total..." option. Use it as a first guess for your site.
• Check the weather station data against the radar totals. Do they give you confidence in the radar estimates?

You have to trade off the higher accuracy of weather stations against the better coverage given by radar.
Here is a brief description of part of the problem. Consider also that radar may do a poor job of estimating rainfall rate in summer thunderstorms and in winter when temperatures are just above zero with snow melting aloft.

8. Cookies?

There are no cookies, web trackers, etc.

9. When does the weather data start?

Check out the Introduction page under the Home menu.