Self-Hosted Weather Radar

Features

Quick Start

Deploy your own instance with Docker in under a minute. Pick the mode that matches your hardware:

Single-container (personal / small-scale):

git clone https://github.com/JoshuaKimsey/LibreWXR.git
cd LibreWXR
cp .env.example .env
docker compose up -d

One process handles fetching, nowcasting, and tile rendering. Best for laptops, small VPSes, and home servers.

Multi-worker (production / multi-core):

git clone https://github.com/JoshuaKimsey/LibreWXR.git
cd LibreWXR
cp .env.example .env
docker compose -f docker-compose.multiworker.yml up -d

The data pipeline runs as a sidecar process while N tile-server workers share state via memmap — scaling tile rendering across every core in the rack with no GIL bottleneck. Defaults target an 80-core / 32 GB rack.

Either way, the server starts in about 6 seconds and begins serving tiles immediately. Historical frames backfill in the background.

Using the API

LibreWXR exposes a Rain Viewer v2 compatible API, plus a few extensions of its own (weather alerts, motion arrows). Point any Rain Viewer client at your instance:

# Metadata endpoint (timestamps + tile paths)
GET https://api.librewxr.net/public/weather-maps.json

# Radar tile
GET https://api.librewxr.net/v2/radar/{timestamp}/{size}/{z}/{x}/{y}/{color}/{smooth}_{snow}.png

# Satellite tile (NOAA GMGSI VIS-over-LW composite)
GET https://api.librewxr.net/v2/satellite/{timestamp}/{size}/{z}/{x}/{y}/0/0_0.png

# Weather alerts (GeoJSON FeatureCollection — global by default, lat+lon, or bbox)
GET https://api.librewxr.net/v2/alerts
GET https://api.librewxr.net/v2/alerts?lat=39.7&lon=-104.9
GET https://api.librewxr.net/v2/alerts?bbox=-95,30,-90,35

# Health check
GET https://api.librewxr.net/health

For Leaflet, the tile URL pattern is:

# Radar tiles
https://api.librewxr.net/v2/radar/{timestamp}/256/{z}/{x}/{y}/10/1_1.png

# With motion arrows (light for dark maps, dark for light maps)
https://api.librewxr.net/v2/radar/{timestamp}/256/{z}/{x}/{y}/10/1_1.png?arrows=light

# Satellite tiles (timestamps from satellite.infrared in metadata)
https://api.librewxr.net/v2/satellite/{timestamp}/256/{z}/{x}/{y}/0/0_0.png

See the full documentation for a web integration guide, configuration reference, and Rain Viewer migration instructions. Try the interactive examples to see LibreWXR in action, or browse the source on GitHub.

Data Sources

Radar composites:

• NCEP MRMS — Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor quality-controlled radar composites (US regions + Canadian radar ingest, default source)
• Iowa Environmental Mesonet (IEM) — NEXRAD radar composites (US regions, fallback for MRMS)
• ECCC MSC GeoMet — Canadian weather radar composite
• EUMETNET OPERA — Pan-European radar composite via MeteoGate (~155 radars, 24 countries). Italy is not in the OPERA station list, so Italian airspace is covered separately by DPC below.
• DPC (Dipartimento della Protezione Civile) — Italian national VMI composite (24 radars: 11 DPC-direct C-band & X-band + 13 partner radars from regional ARPAs, PAA Trento, ENAV, Aeronautica Militare). Open Radar-DPC v2 REST API, 5-min cadence, GeoTIFF format, attribution "Radar-DPC" required under CC-BY-SA 4.0
• MARN / SNET — El Salvador San Andrés radar 120 km product (Servicio Nacional de Estudios Territoriales), reproduced with attribution per MARN's open-data terms
• CWA QPESUMS (Taiwan) — Central Weather Administration 7-radar composite reflectivity product O-A0059-001, licensed under the Open Government Data License v1.0
• JMA HRPN (Japan) — Japan Meteorological Agency High-Resolution Precipitation Nowcast (気象庁ナウキャスト), 20 C-band Doppler radars + AMeDAS rain-gauge network composited as gauge-corrected QPE. Analysis leg only; JPCOMP nowcast frames come from LibreWXR's internal optical-flow extrapolation blended with JMA MSM as the regional model overlay. Ingested under the JMA Public Data License v1.0 (CC-BY equivalent, commercial reuse explicitly permitted with attribution to the Japan Meteorological Agency)
• MET Malaysia — Jabatan Meteorologi Malaysia 12-radar national composite covering Peninsular Malaysia, Borneo, Brunei, Singapore, and N. Sumatra, licensed under CC-BY-4.0 (Radar data © Jabatan Meteorologi Malaysia / METMalaysia)

Regional NWP models (layered ahead of global IFS):

• NOAA HRRR — CONUS (3 km, 15-min subh) + Alaska (3 km, hourly) via NOAA Open Data
• ECCC HRDPS-Continental — 2.5 km rotated lat/lon, covers Canada and the northern fringe of CONUS
• DMI HARMONIE-AROME DINI — 2 km LCC, covers most of populated Europe via AWS Open Data
• DWD ICON-EU — ~7 km, fills the European remainder DINI doesn't reach
• Météo-France AROME Outre-Mer — 2.5 km, five overseas variants from the OVH Swift PNT distribution: Antilles (Guadeloupe + Martinique), Guyane (French Guiana), Indien (Réunion + Mayotte + Comoros + Madagascar + SW Indian Ocean), Nouvelle-Calédonie (New Caledonia + Vanuatu), and Polynésie (French Polynesia)
• SMN Argentina WRF-DET — 4 km LCC, covers the South American Cone via AWS Open Data
• JMA MSM (Mesoscale Model) — 5 km regular lat/lon over Japan + Korean Peninsula + Taiwan + Yellow Sea, republished via the Open-Meteo AWS Open Data mirror. Pairs with the JMA HRPN radar composite to give Japan a real mesoscale NWP forecast instead of falling through to global IFS

Global base layer:

• ECMWF IFS via Open-Meteo — 9 km global precipitation and snowfall. The global base of the NWP chain, covering every pixel the regional models don't reach (CC-BY-4.0)

Satellite imagery:

• NOAA GMGSI — Global Mosaic of Geostationary Satellite Imagery, composited by NESDIS from GOES-East, GOES-West, Meteosat-9, Meteosat-10, and Himawari-9. Longwave IR + visible channels rendered as a VIS-over-LW composite with natural day/night terminator. Hourly cadence; coverage to ±72.7° latitude

Weather alerts:

• WMO Severe Weather — Global CAP weather alerts, polled every 5 minutes
• MeteoAlarm — European geocodes for resolving regional alert polygons
• NWS Alerts API — Used for US point lookups to surface non-polygon alerts (Tornado Watches, etc.)

All data sources are freely available from government-funded institutions. ECMWF IFS data is provided by Open-Meteo under the CC-BY-4.0 license.

Data Licensing

API Data (CC-BY-4.0, with one carve-out) — Radar data, satellite tiles, and all other data served by the public LibreWXR API at api.librewxr.net is available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY-4.0) license. You are free to use, share, and adapt this data for any purpose, including commercial use, provided you give appropriate credit to LibreWXR. The underlying data from government agencies (NCEP MRMS, IEM, ECCC, EUMETNET OPERA, MARN/SNET El Salvador, CWA Taiwan, JMA Japan, MET Malaysia, ECMWF IFS, NOAA GMGSI) is public domain or freely available under their respective terms — the CC-BY-4.0 license applies to the aggregated composite data as served by this API instance, not to the original government data.

Italy (ITCOMP region only) is the exception: tiles that include native Italian radar data from DPC inherit the upstream CC-BY-SA 4.0 share-alike obligation. If you redistribute or build derivative works from DPC-derived tiles, you must do so under the same CC-BY-SA 4.0 terms and credit "Radar-DPC" as the data source. This is the only source in the LibreWXR stack with a share-alike clause; every other layer is permissive.

Software (AGPL-3.0-or-later) — The LibreWXR software itself is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later. If you modify and host LibreWXR, you must make your source code changes available under the same terms.

Self-Hosted Instances — You may choose your own data licensing terms for data served by your own LibreWXR instance. The AGPL-3.0-or-later license for the software applies regardless.

Open Source

LibreWXR is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0). Contributions are welcome on GitHub.