Your New Rain Radar
Hate scrolling to the bottom of your
weather app to find the rain radar?
Only care about Ipswich?
We got you.
’Swich Weather’s Rain Radar puts Ipswich front and
centre. No scrolling.
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Starts with Ipswich. The map
opens on the whole rain picture around Ipswich,
with the city boundary drawn in. Zoom out to see
rain coming from Toowoomba, the Scenic Rim or the
coast.
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Straight to your place. Tap the
house button under + and −, then pick your suburb
or use your location. After that, one tap takes you
to your street and tells you when rain is due there.
Tap it again for the big picture.
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Quick to find. Type
ipswichinsider.com.au/radar, or add this page to
your home screen.
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9 images, not a video. The tool
loads 30 minutes of observed radar, the latest
image and 50 minutes of predicted rain.
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Smooth rain, not squares. Rainbow's
rain comes in squares about 1 km wide. Your browser
blends between them, so the rain keeps soft edges
however far you zoom in.
How it works
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Ten minutes between each image.
Pressing Play cycles through them so you can see
which way the rain is moving.
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Rainbow Weather provides the rain
images. It is a weather data company that
combines radar and satellite data into observed and
predicted rain images.
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The two systems communicate through an
API. An API is a controlled doorway that
lets one piece of software ask another for specific
information. This plugin asks for the rain image for
a particular place and time, and Rainbow sends it
back.
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How Predicting Rain works. After
NOW, Rainbow Weather takes the recent radar and
satellite data, cleans up gaps, then estimates how the
rain will move and change over the next 50 minutes.
The purple frames are predictions, not recorded
observations or guarantees.
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How "rain at your place" works. It
reads the same rain images at your spot: the latest
one, then the five predicted ones, ten minutes apart.
Times are rounded to the nearest ten minutes.
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The API key works like a
password. WordPress keeps it on the server,
so it is never sent to your browser or placed in the
public page code.
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Colours like the BoM radar. Light
rain is white and blue. It turns teal, then yellow,
then red as it gets heavier. The colour steps follow
the Bureau's rain rate scale.
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The same rain is not downloaded for every
reader. The plugin fetches each rain image
from Rainbow once, saves it on this website and
shares it with every reader.
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Dark, Satellite and Map are only
backgrounds. They come from Mapbox and
OpenStreetMap contributors. Changing the background
does not change the rain above it.
Your place stays on your device
Your suburb or location is saved in this
browser only. It is not sent to Ipswich
Insider, and the rain at your place is worked out on
your device. Use "Forget my place" to remove it.
Want more Ipswich Insider?
Rain imagery: Rainbow Weather. Background maps:
Mapbox and OpenStreetMap contributors. City boundary
and suburb list: OpenStreetMap contributors.
For official severe weather and flood
warnings: check the
Bureau of Meteorology’s Ipswich page.
