Weather Radar for Omarchy

Live weather radar for the Omarchy bar. Click the bar icon for a map centred on your location, scrub through the last two hours of precipitation, and optionally be told when a storm is on its way.

Works anywhere RainViewer has radar coverage, which is most of the populated world — no account and no API key.

Not a life-safety tool. This plugin is informational. It shows best-effort third-party radar with no availability guarantee, and it can be late, wrong, or silent. For decisions that matter, use your national weather service and civil defence warnings.

Install

omarchy plugin add https://github.com/eduardodallecort/omarchy-weather-radar.git --enable

The widget lands on the right of the bar. Consider moving it beside the stock weather widget, which sits in the centre by default:

omarchy plugin enable eduardodallecort.weather-radar --section center --after omarchy.weather

The icon is a radar scope, which on its own says "radar" rather than "weather"; standing next to a weather widget supplies the rest. --section takes left, center or right, and --before works like --after. Re-running enable rewrites the widget's entry, so move it before tuning the settings rather than after.

Removing it

omarchy plugin remove eduardodallecort.weather-radar

That deletes the plugin and its entry in the bar. It leaves ~/.local/state/omarchy/settings/weather.json alone, since that file belongs to the stock weather widget rather than to this plugin.

Requirements

Omarchy Quattro, and curl, which Omarchy already installs. The plugin calls omarchy-weather-location to store a chosen city and omarchy-notification-send to raise an alert — both ship with Omarchy. Nothing else is installed, and no configuration outside the widget's own entry is written.

The map

What the colours mean

Radar shows precipitation, not cloud. A completely overcast sky with no rain falling reads as an empty map — that is correct, not a fault. Warmer colours mean heavier precipitation, and the most intense cores usually indicate hail.

Eight palettes are available in the widget settings. NEXRAD Level III is the one most broadcast meteorologists use.

Zoom

RainViewer's radar tiles stop at zoom level 7, about 1.1 km per pixel. The map goes to level 10 anyway: past level 7 the base map carries on sharpening while the radar is scaled up over it.

You zoom in to find out which town is under a storm, and the town comes from the base map, so capping the map at the radar's resolution would withhold detail that is genuinely available. The radar simply gets blockier, which shows plainly where its data ran out.

Where there is no radar

Large parts of the world have no ground radar at all, and there an empty map means "nothing is known" rather than "nothing is falling". When your location is outside coverage, the panel says so beside the city name.

Location

Click the city name at the bottom of the panel and type to search.

The picker is the stock weather widget's — same geocoding, same suggestions — and it writes to the same file, so a city chosen here moves the stock weather widget too, and one chosen there moves the radar. Both watch the file, so neither needs a restart.

The location lives in ~/.local/state/omarchy/settings/weather.json, owned by omarchy-weather-location, which can also be called directly:

omarchy-weather-location

Clearing it returns the weather widget to IP auto-detection. The radar needs coordinates to centre on, so it shows a world view until a city with coordinates is chosen.

In a large city, name your neighbourhood rather than the city: São Paulo is some 50 km across and its centre says nothing useful about the far side. The picker resolves Tatuapé, Vila Mariana, Itaquera and the rest, and the region shown beside each suggestion separates them from their namesakes elsewhere.

Alerts

Alerts are off by default. Turn them on from the toggle in the panel, or in the widget settings.

While on, the plugin checks the forecast every ten minutes — the rate the radar publishes new frames, so checking more often would re-fetch bytes that have not changed. That is roughly 11 MB a month. With alerts off it makes no background requests at all, and fetches only while the map is open.

Two settings shape what reaches you, and they answer different questions. The radius decides how far ahead to look; the threshold decides how bad it has to be to be worth interrupting you. Both are in the panel once alerts are on, and in the widget settings either way.

The threshold: how bad is worth saying

Rates follow the standard intensity scale, checked against 2144 forecast samples over the Sahel, the Amazon, the United States, Indonesia and India. Heavy lands near the 99th percentile of wet slots in that survey: rare enough to mean something, common enough to fire.

The promotion rule is the one that matters for storms. An already-rainy slot is raised one band when CAPE reaches 2000 J/kg, or 1000 J/kg alongside gusts of 45 km/h. Rain alone does not make weather severe — rain arriving into an unstable airmass does, and CAPE measures the energy available to it.

A severe alert names the figures that put it there, and only those: rain heavy enough on its own reads "up to 18 mm/h", while ordinary rain into a loaded airmass reads "CAPE 2400 J/kg". Printing every figure regardless would produce sentences that argue with themselves, since a mild gust quoted beside the word severe reads as a contradiction.

A threshold is what keeps the plugin usable. Without one, a two-hour window fires on every passing shower, which in a wet season is constant noise — and a plugin switched off in irritation takes the alert that mattered with it.

The radius: how much warning you want

The radius draws the rings on the map and sets how far ahead the forecast is inspected, converted at an assumed 50 km/h. Lead time is not free: a four-hour forecast is meaningfully less certain than a one-hour one, so a wider radius buys warning at the cost of crying wolf more often.

The panel offers those four. The widget settings take any value from 25 to 250 km in steps of 25, and one set there appears in the panel alongside the presets.

Where it looks

The forecast model runs on a grid roughly 8-10 km across, and a single coordinate speaks for whichever cell it lands in rather than for the place it names. Measured against Marmeleiro in Paraná: the town centre resolves to a cell 3.8 km away, and a point 1 km south belongs to the next cell over.

So each check samples five points — the centre and four at 5 km — and reports the worst. Around Marmeleiro that covers three model cells instead of one. All five travel in a single request, so the coverage costs a larger response rather than more requests.

Five kilometres covers a town without becoming a regional forecast. Below about 8 km the model has no detail to give: rain on one side of a small town and not the other is a distinction it does not carry. The map is the finer instrument, at 1.1 km per pixel.

Being told once

You are not told twice about the same thing. An alert speaks again only if conditions get worse — heavy becoming severe — and re-arms itself when the outlook drops back under your threshold. A storm parked overhead for three hours is one notification, not eighteen.

Deliberate acts re-arm it, on the principle that adjusting a control is a question and deserves an answer rather than ten minutes of silence:

Switching the toggle off and on is therefore the closest thing to "tell me again".

On screen

A timed toast that fires while you are in the next room is a toast that never happened, and that is the case an alert exists for. Heavy is also the default threshold — the level this plugin calls worth interrupting you over — so letting it expire unseen would contradict its own choice.

That does not make them emergencies: Omarchy only lets a popup through Do Not Disturb when the sender is CLI-style, and this one names itself, so a silenced session files them into notification history instead of showing them.

Clicking an alert dismisses it and nothing else. A click on a toast means "I have seen this" to almost everyone, and spending that gesture on opening a window answers a question the reader did not ask. Open the map yourself when you want it.

Every alert carries both a relative and an absolute time — "in about 2h, around 21:15" — because the relative half is what the eye wants on arrival and the absolute half is what stays true for someone reading it later.

Data sources

• Radar imagery: RainViewer — best-effort, no SLA
• Forecast and geocoding: Open-Meteo
• Base map: CARTO over OpenStreetMap data

Roadmap

• Satellite cloud layer (GOES / Himawari via NASA GIBS)
• Additional radar providers for regions with higher-resolution national networks, selectable per user
• Motion-based arrival estimate rather than distance alone

Development

Symlink a checkout into the plugin directory and the shell picks it up, so the source can live wherever you keep your projects:

ln -s ~/path/to/omarchy-weather-radar ~/.config/omarchy/plugins/eduardodallecort.weather-radar
omarchy-shell shell rescanPlugins
omarchy plugin enable eduardodallecort.weather-radar
omarchy plugin validate .

After editing any QML, restart the shell:

omarchy restart shell

Quickshell's hot reload is deliberately off in Omarchy. A watcher sometimes logs Local plugin changed, reloading, but it cannot be relied on: writing a file atomically — a temporary plus a rename, which most editors and tools do — breaks the inotify watch on the original inode, so it fires once and then goes quiet. rescanPlugins re-reads manifests without recompiling QML that is already loaded. Restarting is the only reliable way to see a change, and an edit that appears to do nothing is usually an edit that was never loaded.

Layout

A bar widget is instantiated once per monitor, so anything that polls belongs in the service, which the shell mounts exactly once per plugin.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.