The Timestamp on Your Weather Radar Doesn't Mean What You Think
Here's something almost no weather app tells you: the timestamp on a radar frame is not the age of the data you're looking at. It's the age of the composite – the moment when hundreds of individual station scans were assembled into a single image. The pixel over your exact location might be 3 minutes old. The pixel 40 kilometers away might be 28 minutes old. Both sit under the same label.
This isn't a bug. It's how composite radar works. And for years, the industry has been perfectly happy not explaining it. At Rain Viewer, we recently decided to stop being part of that silence.
What's actually inside a radar frame
A composite radar map is assembled from 1,200+ ground stations, each scanning on its own schedule. Roughly half update every 5 minutes – mostly stations in dense, well-funded networks. The rest update every 10–15 minutes, or sporadically. Some...
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