Hello
I'm Joshua, and this is the beginning of WeatherNomad.
My interest in weather started around the age of six. At first, I was fascinated by snow and trying to figure out when it might happen.
As I got older, that interest expanded into thunderstorms, severe weather, forecasting, radar, and eventually the technology behind it all. Simply watching the weather wasn't enough anymore. I became interested in the systems and information that make modern weather observation possible.
My work with radar data processing began in 2025. It started because I wanted more control over how I obtained and accessed that data.
That became especially clear during an early severe weather event in 2025. One of the weather applications I relied on most experienced an outage. Though I was not in danger from the storms, that event raised a question that stuck with me:
what if I am in a bad situation someday, I need radar guidance, and I can't get it because someone else's servers are down?
The underlying weather data hadn't disappeared. My access to it had.
That made me realize there is a fundamental difference between weather data being unavailable and my ability to access it being unavailable. I didn't want my access to something as important as radar to depend entirely on whether someone else's service happened to be online.
So I decided to start building the tools myself.
I got off to a very slow start, as I knew nothing about the journey I was about to embark on. I looked to various open-source tools to get a feel for radar data and begin understanding how it worked. After nearly a month of work, I managed to build a fully working prototype.
That early effort made me realize that radar data is much more complex than it might initially seem. There are different products, formats, structures, and ways of representing the data, and working directly with it can be surprisingly difficult. For someone who wants to build their own weather project and obtain radar data directly, that complexity can become a significant barrier before they even get to the part they actually want to build.
That's one reason I have decided to ensure that my radar processors are freely available on github so that everyone can use then—not just those who have the time or expertise to work through the technical complexities of the data.
The motivation isn't simply to create another weather application. It's to reduce dependency, make working with weather data easier, and have more control over how that data is obtained, processed, and presented.
I'm interested in making sure that, no matter where you are, you can have reliable access to the life-saving information provided by the National Weather Service whenever you have an internet connection.
In this blog, I'll write about interesting weather events, examine radar and other weather data, document projects I'm building, and share what I learn along the way. When significant weather is happening, I'll also provide forecasts and analysis when I can, particularly when another perspective or a deeper look at the data may be useful.
There won't be a strict format or publishing schedule. I'll write blog posts when they are needed.
With that said, I look forward to starting this journey with you.
Welcome to WeatherNomad!