Live radar, one line into your map.

6/11/20

6/12/20

6/13/20

6/11/21

6/12/21

6/13/21

Six real tiles, seams shown. Your map requests these and stitches them itself.

Running now

Radar and strikes on the same map.

Nobody else sells lightning as its own product, let alone alongside radar from one vendor and one bill. Toggle the layers and switch palettes below.

Integration

Two calls, then it is a tile layer like any other.

curl -X POST https://api.lightningapi.dev/v1/radar-tiles/token \
  -H "X-API-Key: YOUR_API_KEY"

# -> { "token": "...", "url_template": "...", "window_seconds": 86400 }

curl "https://tiles.lightningapi.dev/v1/frames?t=TOKEN"

# -> { "frames": ["202609030040", "202609030045", ...] }

L.tileLayer(
  `https://tiles.lightningapi.dev/v1/radar/${frame}/{z}/{x}/{y}.png`
    + `?t=${token}&palette=reflectivity`,
  { opacity: 0.8, maxZoom: 12 }
).addTo(map);

What you get

256px PNG, Web Mercator

The scheme Leaflet, MapLibre, Mapbox GL and OpenLayers already speak. Transparent where there is no echo, so it composites straight over your base map.

New frame every 5 minutes

Ultimate reaches back 24 hours. Supercell reaches back 7 days. Ask for a frame outside your window and the response says so, rather than quietly returning a different time.

Four palettes

A conventional reflectivity ramp by default, plus amber, amber-violet and thermal to match your own map. Colour is applied per request, so switching changes nothing underneath.

Coming next: storm rotation

See where a storm is turning, near the ground and higher up. Rotation is the signal that comes before a tornado, and it is the thing you want to know first. Same tiles, same integration.

Its own allowance

5,000,000 tiles a month on Ultimate, unlimited on Supercell. Counted separately from your API calls, so a busy map never spends the budget you bought for strike data.

Radar tiles are in beta: they are live and included on the plans below, and the shape of the API may still move before it settles. Anything that changes will be announced before it does.

Radar covers the continental United States. Tiles outside that area come back transparent rather than as an error, so a map that pans off the coverage simply shows nothing.