General information
AccuWeather's Future Radar API delivers forecast radar overlay tiles — predicted precipitation rendered as PNG tiles for layering onto an existing map. Useful for "what's coming" weather visualizations, commute planners, severe weather monitoring, and hour-ahead radar animations.
→ See the Future Radar Guide and Parameters for endpoint details and request patterns.
Future Radar does not currently include Alaska or Hawaii.
The Future Radar API does not provide base map imagery. Overlay tiles are designed to display on top of a Mercator-projection map service (Google Maps, Mapbox, Leaflet, Bing Maps). Tiles are returned one at a time in PNG format.
Products
Different regions of the world use different radar systems with different update intervals. Without coordination, that inconsistency would cause some regions to appear to "jump" while others move smoothly on a zoomed-out view.
To prevent that, Future Radar groups regional data sources into products. When a viewport spans multiple regions, Future Radar identifies the slowest-refreshing product and matches the others to its rate — producing a cohesive, gracefully-synchronized forecast view.
Each product has a unique code in the form major-minor (two numbers separated by a dash). Both values are returned in any API response that identifies one or more products.
Frames
Some endpoints return a list of frames — each frame has a timestamp and defines one set of forecast radar tiles. The total time span varies by product. When a viewport spans multiple products, Future Radar trims to the shortest time span, so all visible regions cover matching periods.