Cloudburst

Quick and simple weather, all in a single glance

Why does the radar image show something, even when it's not raining?
What you're seeing is probably something called "ground clutter." According to NOAA:

"Echoes from surface targets appear in almost all radar reflectivity images. In the immediate area of the radar, "ground clutter" generally appears within a radius of 20 nm. This appears as a roughly circular region with echoes that show little spatial continuity. It results from radio energy reflected back to the radar from outside the central radar beam, from the earth's surface or buildings."

Translation: You'll sometimes see "noise" in the radar that isn't precipitation and that can be ignored. You can see examples of this here.

Where does the weather information come from?
The current conditions come from Yahoo!, the 4 day forecast comes from Google and the weather radar is retrieved from NOAA.gov.

Why not use the weather radar from Weather.com instead of NOAA.gov?
Weather.com strictly prohibits the use of any of their information by 3rd parties for applications running on mobile devices.

Why does the radar image loop sometimes differ from the current radar image?
Occasionally, the NOAA.gov servers will get out of sync and older images will get retrieved. You will find the time stamp for each weather image at the top, and you can use this to verify the time of the image. If it's out of date, you can reload the panel to try and contact a more up-to-date server.

What does the "Caching" radar image server in Settings do?
Cloudburst uses a web service to store generated radar images, making their retrieval a lot quicker. Each image only has to be assembled once, the first time it's asked for, after which everyone will get the already-created image. Turning the caching server off will cause the app to talk directly to the NOAA.gov servers, which will be slower.

For help or comments: apphelp [at] cloudburstapp.com