Cumulus publishes station numbers: web tags, realtime.txt, dayfile rows. Radar is not one of those numbers. A WSR-88D volume is a NOAA/NWS remote-sensing product. Putting it on a Cumulus website is an embed-and-caption problem: iframe or image, attribution, refresh, and a sentence that says this panel is not <#temp> and not <#rfall>. This article is that publishing guide. It is not the radar-science article on the main TNET Weather host, and it does not rehost NEXRAD files.
For current official U.S. imagery, link or frame NWS Radar. TNET is not a warning service. Cumulus is not a warning service. NWS and local emergency authorities are.
Historical context
The Cumulus hostname kept a /radar menu item because default weather templates expected a map next to the gauges. Operators pasted Weather Underground GIFs, NWS images, or community PHP that fetched a loop. Incoming links wanted “radar on my Cumulus site,” not a textbook on dBZ. The original thumbnails, WU hotlinks, and any GRLevel3 exports are not restored. What the path can still teach is how to include official radar without laundering it as a Cumulus sensor.
The science of reflectivity, beam height, and clutter lives on the main host at Weather radar as remote sensing. Satellite-plus-lightning as mixed evidence on a Cumulus wiki note is satelight. This page stays on how the HTML gets onto a Cumulus template.
Radar is not a web tag
Cumulus MX documents hundreds of web tags for temperature, humidity, pressure, wind, rain, solar, and related station fields. There is no official tag that means “the NWS reflectivity grid for my lat/lon.” If a template author invented <#radar>, it was a custom include, not a logger sample. Mixing a fetched PNG into the same table as <#temp> without a source line is an evidence error: the visitor will think the station measured the county.
Keep three clocks separate:
- Logger time — when Cumulus last read the hardware (
<#time>, realtime packet time). - Template process time — when Cumulus replaced tags and uploaded HTML.
- Radar product time — printed on the NWS image or in the iframe’s UI, in UTC.
Refreshing the Cumulus FTP job does not create a new volume scan. If you upload every five minutes and NWS updates the product every four to six, the page still only shows whatever the iframe or image URL returns at request time.
Prefer official sources, then embed with rules
First choice: a link. A sentence “Current NWS radar for this county” plus radar.weather.gov (or a bookmarked station view such as a WSR-88D site ID) is the lowest-liability, lowest-stale-cache option. NWS documents that the URL updates as you select view and settings, so a bookmark can return to the same station or mosaic.
Second choice: iframe. An iframe whose src is an official NWS Radar view keeps timestamps, legends, and alerts inside NOAA’s page. Width and height belong in the template; do not crop the legend with CSS overflow tricks. If the iframe fails (browser blocking mixed content, NWS outage), show alt text that names NWS, not a blank box that looks like the station died.
Third choice: official image URL. Some offices still publish looping GIFs. If you use one, you are hot-linking a government image. Follow current NWS linking and use guidance, keep the filename’s time if present, and accept that the image will go stale when the office changes paths. Do not copy the file onto your host and serve it as radar.gif without a visible valid time—that is how 2009 loops pretend to be live.
Not a choice: scraping a commercial mosaic into a Cumulus-named file. That hides provenance, often violates terms, and turns your site into an unlabeled CDN. Third-party mosaics are a different object from a WSR-88D volume; the main-host article on that class is radar mosaics.
Attribution, refresh, and layout
A Cumulus radar panel that tells the truth looks like this:
- Heading. “National Weather Service radar (not a station sensor).”
- Site. Named WSR-88D or “NWS national mosaic,” never “our Doppler.”
- Embed. Iframe or linked image, HTTPS, no overlay that covers the timestamp.
- Credit. NOAA / NWS. If Cumulus only supplied the HTML slot, say that.
- Disclaimer. Unofficial page; warnings at weather.gov.
- Neighbor numbers. Rain and lightning, if shown, in separate labeled cells so a tip of the bucket is not confused with a dBZ blob.
Refresh strategy:
- Let the iframe live-update if NWS’s viewer does. Do not wrap it in a meta-refresh every 10 seconds; that hammers both your visitors and the remote host.
- If you must use a static GIF, set a modest HTTP cache on your page, not a year-long cache on a file named
currentradar.png. - Cumulus’s extra-file upload interval should match how often you are willing to admit the surrounding HTML is old. The radar inside the iframe has its own clock.
Mobile templates (historical WAP decks on this host) should not squeeze a full radar viewer into four lines. Link out. The webcam hub already treats cameras as indexed devices with privacy rules; treat radar as an indexed external product with attribution rules.
What not to automate
Do not write a PHP proxy that fetches NWS tiles, strips logos, and re-serves them as Cumulus content. That is rehosting, it ages badly when paths change, and it invites mixed-content and rate-limit failures.
Do not parse NWS HTML with a hobby regex to “extract the GIF.” Official map applications change. The durable interface is the documented NWS Radar site and, for developers, the product services NWS describes on that site.
Do not bind radar colors to web-tag rain. A derived “it’s raining because the pixel is green” flag is a new algorithm. If you did not document it, do not show it. Web-tag vocabulary for actual station fields remains tnetwebtags.php.
Do not present old GRLevel3 or GOES captures from a shared hosting folder as current. If you keep a historical loop for a case study, the caption must include the date and “archive.”
Safety and independence
Lightning, flash flood, and severe thunderstorm decisions are NWS products. An iframe that happens to show a warning polygon is still not your warning. The Cumulus site should not paraphrase headlines into icons. TNET Weather, including this restored Cumulus URL, does not replace weather.gov.
TNET is independent of SpaceX, Starlink, NOAA, and the Cumulus MX maintainers. Embedding NWS radar does not create an official relationship.
Modern relevance
A Cumulus page is a publishing surface. Radar on that surface is borrowed official remote sensing. TNET’s public distinction among observed, modelled, and derived information is how the service works. Precipitation structure as a weather evidence family—not as an iframe—is evidence families. The Horizon study review may be read as conceptual research on weather and Starlink; it does not say that a Cumulus radar thumbnail predicts throughput, and it does not say that clouds alone reduce speed.
The Cumulus hub lists related historical projects. Station-era observation pages on the main host are under observations.
This hostname does not display live radar at this URL.
Sources
- NWS Radar (last checked 13 August 2026)
- National Weather Service
- Cumulus Wiki, Webtags (last checked 13 August 2026)
- NOAA NCEI, NEXRAD (last checked 13 August 2026)
- TNET, How the service works
- TNET, The evidence families behind a connection outlook
- TNET Cumulus hub