Why are NWS radars so bad in Florida

[boca]

It seems lately that the NWS radars out of Miami, Melbourne, and Key West are down more than when their operational. It can't be down for maintenance just because of the frequency of it not working. I wonder if it has to do with funding.

[JonathanBelles]

The Tampa radar is also down 25% of the time.

[wxmann_91]

I don't know if it's some error in the javascript code, but for some reason, all NWS radars sometimes randomly go down (not actually go down, but the radar image won't pop up and instead it will say "down for maintenance" or something like that). Just click refresh a few times and it'll start working again.

[AJC3]

It seems lately that the NWS radars out of Miami, Melbourne, and Key West are down more than when their operational. It can't be down for maintenance just because of the frequency of it not working. I wonder if it has to do with funding.

If you're talking about the fact that the NWS radar page will give you a blanked out "radar imagery unavailable" screen when you click on it, that's related to internal web server issues. The 88D radars in Florida aren't down at all very much, and data problems between our office and our users are infrequent. Our 88D tech will take the radar down for preventative maintenance (PM) but this will only be done during good weather days, and a FTM (free text message) will be sent out before and after each outage.