Building an Open-Source NOAA MRMS Radar Renderer in Python

When the development of Weather Experience began, releasing an open-source project was not part of the initial plan. The core question was whether a modern radar rendering pipeline could be built using NOAA's publicly available MRMS data. This inquiry led into a deep dive involving GRIB2 decoding, radar products, rendering pipelines, and performance benchmarking, culminating in the release of MRMS Renderer, the very first open-source project from Taylor Creative Development.

NOAA's Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor (MRMS) system delivers an immense volume of weather data. For this implementation, the focus centered on the ReflectivityAtLowestAltitude product because it establishes a robust foundation for weather visualization. Transforming raw data into something actionable posed a distinct challenge, and the MRMS Renderer executes a complete workflow consisting of the following steps:

• Downloading the latest GRIB2 data directly from NOAA
• Decoding the weather radar information
• Processing through the rendering pipeline
• Exporting the finished output as a ready-to-use PNG image

The project intentionally avoids providing a hosted radar service, opting instead to demonstrate how developers can work directly with NOAA's public data feeds. Performance was naturally a primary concern at the outset, questioning whether such a pipeline could execute fast enough for modern applications.

<

Rather than relying on assumptions, benchmarks were written and executed on an M4 Pro MacBook Pro over a standard Wi-Fi connection. The results showed that the complete pipeline—from fetching the newest MRMS frame to rendering the final PNG—consistently finished in roughly two seconds. Interestingly, the renderer itself was not the latency bottleneck since it was already heavily optimized using NumPy vectorization. Instead, the largest source of delay turned out to be downloading the GRIB2 data over the network, a discovery that directly influenced architectural decisions for the upcoming Weather Experience application.