It would be very useful in my area in Northern Michigan to have a radar widget that displays bubbles with different colors for the different times of the day where there is precipitation forecasted. You can see a visual mockup of such a widget below.
The forecast would only be for “Today”, and showing anything above “X” mm/hr.
It would use whatever radar system you’ve chosen to compile and predict the precipitation bubbles for the different times of the day.
[Edit: Changed the visualization to better show “messy” conditions]
I just want to clear “Radar forecast” is not equal to a “Precipitation forecast”. Radar is a measure of reflectivity in decibels (dB). Precipitation rate or accumulation is a measure of how much water has precipitated out of the air and fallen to the ground.
We need to stop using the word “radar” when we mean “precipitation” because it leads to confusion.
On the widget itself, widgets are no simple to make and this one is particularly complex because of the background processing.
The configurations I can see:
threshold - You are right in setting the “x mm/hr”.
time range - You suggest “Today” as a time limit but users will want to change this - so this will be another setting.
how do you decide where to put the circles and what duration does each circle have. I think it’ll look more like rainbow lines for passing showers or broad rainbow bands for passing bands of rain.
the region to show or zoom level
the data source
This is not a simple widget to make. We’ll need to show clear value in having such a widget. Is it used elsewhere?
Also we’ll need to show how many users would use this. I’d hate to spend days to weeks implementing this and find only a few people use it.
