Where can I find data about Vancouver's weather?

Question

I'm making a personal (non-commercial) project that requires weather radar data. I'm primarily interested in precipitation (rain, snow, sleet, etc) and not sun amount, temperature, etc.

• data should be freely available
• the area should be Metro Vancouver
• hourly resolution/data point or less is preferred
• recent/real-time data preferred over historical (many years ago)
• not aggregate over an area (I don't want "1 mm rain in Vancouver at 11:00 am on April 20, 2024", but where the rain is. In the image below, it shows rain coming in from the West, and moving towards East)

(image source)

I do not want the raw sensor data at a single point of location (latitude/longitude of radar, precipitation at radar location, etc), but DPQPE/PRECIP-ET reflectivity value from radars with Blocking Beam/Beam Attenuation/Overshooting Beam/Virga/Anomalous Propagation/Ground Clutter/Electromagnetic Interference filtered out.

• any file format is acceptable if I can process it
• any authority type is acceptable (government-issued data, crowdsourced data, etc) as long as it is reasonably accurate (doesn't saying sunny when it's pouring rain)

Answer 1

Given my previous experience with weather radar data (I'm not really familiar with the situation in North America I must admit), I found some products which might be interesting for you - might, because I do not know what exactly your project requires. Do you just want to visualize data on your personal homepage, embed in your webGIS framework for visualization purposes or do you want to extract data as input for a hydrological model?

• DPQPE/PRECIP-ET seems to be provided in GIF format. Aldergrove site (ID: CASAG) data can either be queried from Canadian Historical Weather Radar or MSC Datamart.
• North American Radar Composite also seems to be a promising product but it seems like it's only offered via WMS. Again, this totally depends on your needs.

By the way, some additional information from the MSC Open Data FAQ:

The weather radar data that we freely provide to the public are the North American Radar Composite and Extrapolation via GeoMet-Weather Geospatial Web Services. The North American Radar Composite is available every 6 minutes for the past 3 hours. We also offer the GIF images on the MSC open data server. Documentation of radar observations can be consulted for other radar data and products.

The raw data, as well as various other products, are provided by a cost-recovered service. As part of this service, we push the data to the client's FTP server and provide a 24/7 service. The documentation for radar products and radar data formats is available.

However, I have not worked with US NEXRAD data before but I would expect they did not crop data to the national border so there is probably a chance the radar site in Seattle (ID: KATX) does also cover Vancouver (just guessing). Data is available from NOAA/NCDC and the period of record seems to depend on the scope of postprocessing. L2 data is available in near real-time and L3 data until t-2 days. Direct download from AWS is available here and required decoders are supplied at NOAA/NCEI.