Help & Instructions

Getting Started

KC9ZHV Weather shows live National Weather Service alerts, current conditions, an hourly forecast, a multi-day forecast, and radar for any location in the United States. There are two ways to look up weather:

1. Type a city and state (or county and state) into the search box and press Get Weather.
2. Tap Use My Location to get weather for exactly where you are, using your device's GPS. See Using Your Location below for how to allow that.

Once a location loads, the page keeps itself current automatically — alerts and current conditions refresh about every 90 seconds since those can change at any moment, while the hourly and extended forecast (which barely change minute to minute) refresh every 20 minutes instead. You don't need to do anything either way; it all happens in the background.

Searching for a Location

The search box accepts:

• City, State — e.g. Olney, IL or Chicago, Illinois
• County, State — e.g. Richland County, IL

You can press Enter on your keyboard instead of tapping the button. If you tap Get Weather with the box empty, it will look up the example location shown in gray (the placeholder text) rather than searching for nothing.

Using Your Location (GPS)

When you tap Use My Location, your phone or computer's operating system and browser will ask you for permission before sharing your location with this site — this is a standard privacy protection built into every modern browser, not something specific to this page. You have to say "yes" (Allow) for it to work. Exactly what that prompt looks like depends on your device:

If your device truly can't or won't share GPS, you can always just type your city or county into the search box instead — every feature on the page works the same way either way.

Saving a Location

1. Search for a location, or use GPS, so that weather results load.
2. The ★ Save Location button (grayed out until something has loaded) becomes active.
3. Tap it. The location appears as a small rounded chip underneath the search box.
4. Tap directly on a saved chip's name any time to reload weather for that location instantly, without retyping it.
5. Tap the × on a chip to remove it.

You can save as many locations as you like — handy for checking weather back home, at a family member's place, or anywhere else you check often.

Understanding Your Results

• Active Weather Alerts — any current NWS watches, warnings, or advisories for that location, color-coded by severity.
• Current Conditions — temperature, wind, sky, and (when the station reports them) feels-like, humidity, dew point, pressure and visibility. If the nearest weather station isn't reporting a temperature, the next-nearest working station is used; the card always says which station and what time the reading is from.
• Hourly Forecast — a scrollable strip covering roughly the next 24 hours; swipe or scroll sideways to see further out.
• Extended Forecast — the standard NWS multi-day/night forecast, with icons and detailed text for each period.
• Sun & Moon — sunrise, sunset, hours of daylight and the moon phase, in that location's own time zone.
• Forecaster's Discussion — tap to open the NWS forecasters' own write-up explaining the forecast. It only loads when you open it.

All of this data comes from the National Weather Service (api.weather.gov). To keep from overloading NWS's free service, this site shares each answer briefly between everyone viewing the same place: alerts for only 10 seconds (they're life-safety information), current conditions 2 minutes, forecasts 15 minutes. Alerts are re-checked every 30 seconds while the page is open, so a new, upgraded or cancelled warning appears within about 40 seconds of NWS publishing it. The line under the alerts shows when they were last checked. To save data, checking pauses while the tab is in the background and catches up the moment you come back — unless Warning Alerts is on, in which case it keeps checking.

If NWS or your connection goes down, the page doesn't go blank: it keeps showing every alert it already knew about until that alert's own scheduled end time, with a notice saying when they were last confirmed. Alerts that have ended are removed automatically.

Warning Alerts (Sound & Notifications)

Tap 🔔 Warning Alerts next to the search buttons to turn it on. While this page is open, a new Tornado, Severe Thunderstorm, Flash Flood or Extreme Wind Warning for the location you're viewing plays a short alert tone and, if you allow notifications, shows a pop-up notification. Your browser will ask for notification permission the first time.

Sharing a Location

After you search for a place, the address bar changes to something like https://weather.kc9zhv.com/?q=Olney, IL. Copy or bookmark that link and it opens straight to that place's weather. Locations found with Use My Location are never put in the link, so you can't accidentally share your exact position.

Radar Loop

After you search, the radar automatically switches to the nearest NWS radar site for that location (shown as “Local” in the dropdown). Use the Region dropdown to switch to the continental US or one of the regional views (plus Alaska, Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico). The image refreshes automatically every 5 minutes. For a bigger view, use the Radar Map Large or Radar Regional Maps All links near the top of the main page.

Satellite Imagery

Below the radar loop, the View dropdown switches between 17 GOES satellite views — full-color GeoColor imagery from both GOES-East and GOES-West, covering the continental US plus regional views (Northeast, Southeast, Rockies, Mississippi Valley, Atlantic Coast, Caribbean, Pacific Coast, Alaska, Hawaii, and more). It updates automatically about every 5 minutes, matching how often NOAA publishes a new image.

For every regional view side-by-side, use the Satellite Regional Maps link near the top of the main page. From there, clicking any title opens that specific view in its own auto-refreshing tab — handy for keeping an eye on one region while you do something else.

Want to see motion, not just the latest snapshot? Use the Show Loop button next to the satellite image (on the main page, the regional maps, or any single view). This switches to NOAA's real animated loop — about 50 frames covering several hours of history, so you can actually watch clouds and storm systems move. It's a large file (several megabytes, since it's a genuine animated GIF, not a single picture), so it only loads when you ask for it rather than automatically.

Ham Radio Panels

• SKYWARN Spotter Status — the “Spotter Information Statement” from the local NWS office's Hazardous Weather Outlook, saying whether spotter activation is expected. Tap Full outlook for the whole product.
• HF Propagation & Space Weather — solar flux (SFI), the planetary Kp index and NOAA's R/S/G space weather scales from the Space Weather Prediction Center, plus a simple Good/Fair/Poor guide for the higher and lower HF bands. That guide is a rule of thumb (higher flux helps the upper bands; a high Kp hurts everything), not a propagation forecast.
• NOAA Weather Radio — the transmitters covering that county with call sign and frequency, plus the county's SAME code for programming a weather radio to alert only for your county. From NWS's own county coverage list.

Local County Resources (SE Illinois)

If you search a location in Richland, Crawford, Lawrence, Jasper, Jefferson, or Wayne County, Illinois (or search anywhere else in Illinois), a highlighted box automatically appears with links to that county's dedicated companion site — a lighter watches-and-warnings page and/or a fuller alerts-plus-radar page. A full list of all of these county pages is always available near the bottom of the main page too.

Installing as an App

KC9ZHV Weather can be installed to your phone's home screen like a regular app, so it opens full-screen without browser address bars.

Once installed, long-pressing the app icon on Android offers quick shortcuts for "Use My Location" and the radar loop.

Uninstalling / Managing the App

Installed apps are removed the same way as any other app on your device — a website has no ability to uninstall itself (browsers block that on purpose, for your safety). Here's the fastest way on each platform:

Dark Mode

The Dark Mode button in the top right switches between light and dark themes. Your choice is remembered on this device. If you've never toggled it, the page automatically matches your system's light/dark setting.

Privacy & Your Data

This site (weather.kc9zhv.com) is run on a personal server owned and operated by Loren Tedford (KC9ZHV) — but the weather data itself is not: every alert, forecast, current condition, and radar image comes directly, in real time, from the National Weather Service (api.weather.gov and radar.weather.gov), a US government service. This site doesn't generate or alter that data — it fetches it from NWS and displays it for you, keeping each answer only briefly (seconds to minutes) so many visitors can share it without overloading NWS's free service. Space weather comes from NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center and Weather Radio details from NWS's coverage list, handled the same way.

Here's exactly what happens with your data:

• Weather data and location name lookups both pass through a small proxy on this site's own server on their way to the National Weather Service and to OpenStreetMap's geocoding service, respectively. This isn't for tracking — it's so this site can properly identify itself to those services (a required "who's calling" header that, technically, your browser won't let a web page set directly). Your coordinates aren't logged or tied to you personally; geocoding results are cached briefly (about 2 minutes) purely to avoid redundant lookups.
• Nothing here is sold, shared, or sent to any advertising or tracking service.
• Saved locations live only in your browser (a technology called localStorage) — they are never sent to or stored on any server, don't sync between your devices, and are gone if you clear your browser's site data. Your Warning Alerts on/off choice is remembered the same way.

Troubleshooting

"No location found for …"

Try adjusting how you typed it — see the tip under Searching for a Location above.

"Current conditions unavailable"

The nearest observation station is occasionally offline briefly; alerts and the forecast are unaffected and will still show normally. Try again in a few minutes.

GPS / "Use My Location" isn't working

See the full Using Your Location (GPS) section above — it's almost always a permission setting on your device or browser.

The page looks out of date or something I fixed doesn't show up

Browsers cache pages. Try a hard refresh: Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+R on a Mac, or fully close and reopen the tab on mobile.