The NWS radar web interface is one those great examples of a government service done right. They've been working on an upgraded version, the public deployment was just pushed back a week. The new stuff appears much more bandwidth intensive, especially since "shared cache" is dead.
https://preview-radar.weather.gov/ still seems to be getting assets off arcgis.com ; surely theres room for a public map server that can stand this traffic?
I haven't looked at the code; I suspect its amenable to hacking up one's own views.
I think the new site is horrible and bloated and slow. I've been using their multi sensor page for a couple of years now and think it is much better: https://mrms.nssl.noaa.gov/qvs/product_viewer/
Completely agree. They are even using tiles for the radar image which makes it look awful and blocky because they don't all load properly.. unlike the local radar of current version which is the entire image of that radar site.
AGOL (ArcGIS Online) is only providing the basemap and layer overlays (state boundaries etc), those probably come from Esri's "public" data portal and I doubt are part of the bandwidth issue.
Yup. I can't even access the new version. I've attempted to email them asking if they'd keep the perfect content-centric HTML-as-a-document site up but never received any responses.
The animated displays are miserably slow to load and don't perform very well. I'm in the habit of using the radar lite version of the old system, which has the whole gif loaded fast enough for the first loop to not be delayed.
On the new site, the base map tiles start to filter in after about the same amount of time, along with a few pieces of the first radar frame.
https://preview-radar.weather.gov/ still seems to be getting assets off arcgis.com ; surely theres room for a public map server that can stand this traffic?
I haven't looked at the code; I suspect its amenable to hacking up one's own views.