NexView Fahrenheit Research

Use this command to install NexView:

winget install --id=FahrenheitResearch.NexView -e

Open-source NEXRAD Level 2 weather radar viewer written in Rust. Downloads real-time radar data directly from AWS and renders it with map overlays.

NexView

Open-source NEXRAD Level 2 weather radar viewer written in Rust. Downloads real-time radar data directly from AWS and renders it with map overlays.

Features

Real-time NEXRAD data — streams directly from NOAA's public AWS S3 bucket (no API key needed)
All dual-pol products — REF, VEL, SW, ZDR, CC, KDP
Quad view — display 4 products simultaneously
Interactive map — OpenStreetMap tiles with Web Mercator projection, pan/zoom
130+ radar sites — click to switch, or search by name/state
Fast — parallel bzip2 decompression (rayon), line-drawing renderer, GPU-accelerated display (wgpu)
Keyboard shortcuts — arrow keys for tilt/product cycling, Q for quad toggle
Persistent settings — save your default station, zoom level, and view preferences

Performance

On a typical machine:

Download: ~700ms (6MB file from S3)
Parse: ~120ms (parallel bzip2 decompression)
Render: ~60ms (4 products in quad view)

Keyboard Shortcuts

Key	Action
Up/Down	Tilt up/down (elevation sweeps)
Left/Right	Cycle through products
Q	Toggle quad view

Building

cargo build --release

The binary is fully self-contained with no runtime dependencies.

How It Works

NexView parses NEXRAD Level 2 Archive II files (ICD 2620010H) directly from binary. The parser handles:

Volume header extraction
Message Type 31 (Digital Radar Data) parsing
Data moment block decoding with proper scale/offset
bzip2 block decompression (parallelized across CPU cores)

Radar data is rendered using a fast line-drawing algorithm that traces radial lines across each gate's azimuth span, avoiding expensive per-pixel trigonometry.

Data Source

All radar data comes from NOAA's public NEXRAD Level 2 archive on AWS S3 (unidata-nexrad-level2 bucket). No authentication or API keys required.

License

MIT