Precipitation map by city 🏙️
Precipitation map & rain radar
The interactive precipitation map shows rain, showers and storms moving across a network of weather radars and satellites (RainViewer): the past ~2 hours of frames plus a short nowcast. The base layer is OpenStreetMap; tiles go through our caching proxy, so the map loads fast and does not depend on the upstream service directly.
How to read the radar colours
The colour shows intensity — how much water falls per hour. Light blue is drizzle and light rain; deep blue and green mean moderate rain; yellow is heavy rain; red and crimson mean a downpour, often with thunder, gusts and poor visibility. In winter the same scale applies to snow: the radar measures water content, not phase, so blue areas below freezing are snowfall and yellow ones are heavy or wet snow.
Animation and nowcast
The ▶ button animates the frames: you can see where a rain band came from and where it is heading. Precipitation travels with the air mass, so its direction and speed tell you whether rain will reach a given city and roughly when. The slider steps through frames manually. The final frames are marked as a nowcast — extrapolated cloud movement for the next hour rather than a radar observation, so they are less accurate.
Why the map can be empty
An empty map means only one thing: there is no precipitation within range right now. That is normal, not a loading failure — in clear weather the radar has nothing to show. Radar coverage is also uneven: it is dense over European Russia and Europe, while over oceans, Siberia and sparsely populated regions the data comes mostly from satellites, so the detail is coarser. If you need a day-ahead forecast rather than the current situation, open the weather page of the city — precipitation is given there by hour and by day with probabilities.
Where the data comes from and how often it updates
The frames come from a network of ground weather radars and satellite imagery aggregated by RainViewer. A ground radar sends a pulse and, from the echo off droplets and snowflakes, determines where precipitation falls and how intense it is; satellites fill the gaps where radars are absent. A new frame arrives every five to ten minutes, and about two hours of history is available at once — enough to see the trend: a band intensifying, weakening, or simply travelling along a front.
How the radar differs from a forecast
The radar is fact: it shows precipitation falling right now, with only minutes of delay. A forecast is a model computation for hours and days ahead, and it inevitably gives probability rather than certainty. They work best together: the forecast answers “what kind of day will it be”, the radar answers “what is happening this minute and in the next hour”. If the model promised evening rain but the band has already reached the city, adjust your plans earlier — and conversely, a yellow blob skirting the city often means the promised downpour will land on a neighbouring district.
Other weather maps
Besides precipitation there are air-temperature, cloud-cover and cyclone maps — switch with the tabs at the top. The temperature map shows where it is warmer or colder, cloud cover tells you whether to expect sun, and cyclones explain the cause of the weather: atmospheric vortices bring fronts, and with them rain and wind. Data refreshes every few minutes, so reload the page before heading out.