All model and radar products are timestamped in UTC. South African Standard Time is two hours ahead, year round.
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Observed · every few minutes
Lekwena Radar
The university's dual-polarised C-band Doppler radar outside Potchefstroom. Latest reflectivity image, an interactive maximum-dBZ map and automatically tracked storm cells with their characteristics.
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Observed · hourly
Weather stations
Live readings from the NWU automatic weather stations around Potchefstroom — temperature, rain, wind, solar radiation and reference evapotranspiration — plus year-to-date records for every site.
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Forecast · 72 hours
NWU-WRF
A three-domain WRF-ARW forecast run in house every day, down to a 3 km convection-permitting nest over North West and Gauteng. Gridded fields plus impact dashboards for storms, heat, frost, fire and irrigation.
Open the forecasts → -
Forecast · vertical profiles
Model soundings
Skew-T / log-p diagrams for 48 locations across Southern Africa, from 16 convection-permitting sites on the Highveld out to synoptic stations in Zambia, Mozambique and Madagascar.
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Observed · every 10 minutes
Satellite
Meteosat Third Generation and MSG imagery straight from EUMETSAT - GeoColour with live lightning, Convection RGB, water vapour, airmass, instability and detected thunderstorm cells, with a scrubbable loop.
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Latest radar image
Lekwena C-band reflectivity
Reflectivity in dBZ, timestamped UTC. Refreshes automatically every two minutes. If the timestamp on the image is more than about ten minutes behind the clock above, the radar or its link is down.
New to radar imagery? The about page walks through how to read the time stamp, the dBZ scale, the place markers and the interference that a busy 5.6 GHz band puts into the picture.