What's New

Aircraft Pages: Live Planes Restored

• Fix The Aircraft page showed no planes for about eleven days — the data feed behind it lost its delivery route during a hosting move and nothing noticed. Live aircraft are flowing again. If the feed ever stalls from now on, the page says so instead of showing planes that have already left, and an automatic check flags it.

Radar+: Map Timestamp & Swipe Compare

• New An always-visible “as of” badge right on the map, not just in the status line below it — so the current time stays in view while you pan and zoom.
• New Swipe compare mode alongside the existing Side by Side view: drag a handle across a single map to reveal radar under satellite (or any two layers), instead of splitting the screen into two smaller maps.

River Gauges: Faster First Load

• Fix The river gauge cards sometimes loaded slowly — reported live (on the Indianapolis sibling site, same shared code here). The page was waiting on two separate USGS requests (the live reading, then a “vs. normal” context lookup) one after the other before showing anything, and each can take several seconds on its own. They now run at the same time, roughly halving the worst-case wait before the cards appear.

Highland Lakes: Fixed “Unavailable” on First Load

• Fix The lake cards sometimes showed “Unavailable,” then worked after a reload — reported live. The page was fetching Highland Lakes levels live from the Texas Water Development Board on the first visit after a cache window expired, and occasionally that round trip was slow enough to time out. Lake levels are now refreshed hourly and served instantly, with no live fetch on your visit at all.

New Radar+ Page

• New A dedicated radar & satellite page, one tap from the top of the home page. Switch a full-size map between animated radar, live GOES-East visible satellite, and infrared satellite; toggle NOAA's SPC Day 1 severe-weather outlook and a NWS Austin/San Antonio office pin; or compare any two of those views side by side in synced panes — collapsed by default on a phone, open by default on a larger screen.

Yesterday's Extremes Is Back on Weather Nerds

• Fix The “Yesterday's Extremes” box above the Statewide map wasn't showing — it lists the Texas and national high, low and heaviest precipitation for yesterday. The box reads a daily data file that this site wasn't yet serving, so it stayed hidden while the map below it worked. That file is now served, and the box appears again.

Seasonal Outlook: Fixed Dead-End Link

• Fix The Seasonal Outlook link went to an index page, not a map — CPC's landing page for this product is a table of data-archive links, several of which lead to a probability chart rather than the actual outlook map. Weather Nerds now embeds the current 3-month temperature & precipitation outlook map directly, the same way the 30-Day outlook above it already does.

Statewide Map: Fixed False Dry Holes

• Fix The Statewide Yesterday precip map could understate a real storm's footprint — a cluster of volunteer reporting stations occasionally carries forward a stale “0.00″” instead of reporting missing, even when nearby official stations clearly show real rain. That punched a false dry hole into the interpolated map right in the middle of an actual wet area. A station reading exactly zero while tightly surrounded by meaningfully wet neighbors is now dropped from the map instead of rendered as a false gap.

Allergy Forecast

• New Allergy Forecast page — today's grass, tree and weed pollen levels (0–5 Universal Pollen Index), the specific plants driving each number, and a 5-day outlook per allergen. No map here — unlike weather or air quality, there is no dense network of physical pollen-counting stations to interpolate between, so a map would fake a precision the data doesn't have. A new Pollen mini-card also sits on the home page next to Air Quality.
• Fix NOAA Weather Radio map could be dragged and zoomed, and ran full-width on wide screens — it's meant as a static reference of station locations. Scroll-wheel zoom was the only interaction actually disabled; dragging, double-click zoom, and the zoom buttons still worked, and the map stretched edge-to-edge on desktop instead of staying a compact card. Both fixed on all four sites.

NOAA Weather Radio & Statewide Map Fix

• New NOAA Weather Radio station map — on Weather Nerds, every NWR transmitter within 125 miles of Austin, with its real broadcast frequency and a live Broadcastify audio link where one exists.
• Fix Statewide Yesterday map could zoom in too tight, or land at an inconsistent zoom, on mobile — the map's initial view is now fit after the page finishes laying out the box, at a fractional zoom instead of Leaflet's default whole-level snapping, and is locked to Texas so it can't be panned or zoomed away from it.

Site Launched

• New Austin Area Weather launches — a sibling site to duluthareaweather.com and rochestermnweather.com, extended west into the Texas Hill Country. Current conditions (Austin-Bergstrom, Austin Executive, Georgetown, plus San Antonio, Waco, Temple, Fredericksburg and Kerrville on the regional map), a 7-day forecast from NWS Austin/San Antonio, radar, air quality, and moon phase.
• New Hill Country river gauges with flood forecasts — the Guadalupe (Kerrville, Comfort), Blanco (Wimberley), Pedernales (Johnson City, Fredericksburg) and Llano rivers, plus the Colorado River at Austin. Each card shows the NWS flood forecast (National Water Prediction Service) alongside the observed USGS flow, not just a bare reading — these rivers are flash-flood-prone, so the forecast matters more than the slow day-to-day trend a Midwest river shows.
• New Highland Lakes levels — percent-full and elevation for Lake Buchanan, Lake LBJ, Lake Marble Falls, Inks Lake, Lake Travis and Lake Austin, from the Texas Water Development Board.
• New Sky Watch — next to Sky Now: the next meteor shower, next lunar & solar eclipse (with Austin-specific visibility), the next planetary conjunction, and when Orion returns to the evening sky. Computed live client-side (no API/key), plus a link to the NWS hourly sky-cover forecast.