Precipitation map in Crimea 🌧️

The map coverage is computed over 1076 settlements of the region; the nowcast frames show cloud movement for the next hour.

Precipitation map in Crimea — how to read the radar

The map shows actual precipitation in Crimea from a network of weather radars and satellites (RainViewer): the last ~2 hours of frames plus a short nowcast. The zoom is set so the whole region is visible together with the neighbouring areas — that is how you see where a rain band is coming from. Use the wheel or a pinch to zoom in on a particular city.

Radar colours

The colour shows intensity — how much water falls per hour. Light blue and blue mean drizzle or light rain, green is moderate, yellow is heavy, red and crimson mean a downpour, often with thunder and gusts. In winter the scale is the same but the precipitation is snow: the radar measures water content, not phase, so below freezing the blue areas are snowfall and the yellow ones 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. At regional scale this is more useful than at city scale — precipitation travels with the air mass, so the direction of the front tells you which areas will be covered within the hour and which will be missed. 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.

Precipitation is uneven across the region

This is the reason to look at the map and not just the forecast: the weather in Crimea is rarely the same everywhere. A summer downpour can travel as a band ten kilometres wide — a wall of water in one town and dry streets in the next. Steady rain, by contrast, covers the whole region and shows up as a large even field creeping in from the west. A forecast gives a probability for a point, the radar gives the real picture across the whole area — which is what you want before driving between towns.

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. Data refreshes every five to ten minutes, so reload the page before heading out. If you need a forecast for the day or the week rather than the current situation, open the weather page of the city: precipitation is given there by hour and by day, with probability and millimetres.

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.