Stable release. US wind now shows the current hour in the right place, at the right speed. NOAA radar covers Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam, radar loops reload from the browser with DWD's forecast included, every frame says how old it is, and wildfire popups say much more. One breaking change, below.
⚠️ Breaking: without a CARTO key, map_style: Auto uses Home Assistant's map tiles
CARTO now answers keyless requests with a blank "API KEY REQUIRED" tile, so Auto's CARTO Light and Dark maps were blank. Without carto_api_key, Auto now uses Home Assistant's own map tiles (2026.10+, inverted in dark mode like HA's map), or Grey/GreyDark/OSM on older cores. To keep CARTO's look, add a free key from carto.com/basemaps/apikey (no account needed):
type: custom:weather-radar-card
map_style: Auto
carto_api_key: YOUR_KEYChoosing a CARTO style without a key now shows a banner, and the editor marks those styles as needing one.
What's new
- Radar loops reload from the browser, forecast included — the tile cache from 3.11, which keeps RainViewer, NOAA and DWD history frames once they're final, now keeps DWD's forecast frames too: they're pinned to one nowcast run, and a run's forecast for a future time doesn't change. After a reload or a dashboard switch the card plays the stored loop straight away (the forecast from the last run, at most 30 minutes old) and fetches only the newest frames and run, history first. In testing, a reloaded 2 h history + 2 h forecast DWD loop needed 18 tile requests instead of 196 and played after 6.5 s; its first, uncached load took 69 s. Requested by @m42cel (#279).
- Relative times and stale-data cues — every frame says how far back or ahead it is (15 minutes ago, Forecast · in 25 minutes), forecast segments of the progress bar are hatched, and radar data older than its source should ever lag shows an amber ⚠ N min old.
- NOAA radar in Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Guam — blank there since 3.7; tiles now include every US regional mosaic.
- Richer wildfire popups — location, personnel, cause, and how old the perimeter is, with InciWeb links for many more fires (22 of the 30 largest instead of 10).
Fixed
- US wind (NWS NDFD) showed the forecast for about 15 hours ahead, a little too far north — with Hurricane Isaias in the Gulf, its circulation showed over Alabama, 4° north of the radar eye. It now sits within 10 km of NHC's position (#293).
- US wind speeds were about 1.9× too strong — NDFD serves knots and the card read them as m/s.
- Steadier loops — NOAA loops keep their 5- or 10-minute frames, RainViewer loops no longer reach past
past_minutes, and loops with a frame interval longer than their refresh no longer drift down to it. - DWD's heaviest rain could be cut out of the default and dBZ layers.
- NWS "Extreme Heat" and a dozen newer alert types were uncategorised.
Changed
- DWD history is capped at 24 hours (was 84, reachable only in YAML): older frames could fail and stop the rest of the loop loading.
- Wildfire data is a fraction of the size — a refresh fetches about 8 KB of fire details instead of 1.4 MB of perimeters.
- RainViewer requests are capped at 250 a minute (was 500).
- Docs and editor text corrected against the live services.
Internal
- The card's file now carries the licence notices of the code bundled into it (Leaflet, Leaflet.markercluster, Lit, custom-card-helpers), about 5 KB (#292).
- NOAA keeps working if one regional mosaic disappears; failed NWS zone requests log one error per batch; DWD forecast frames are always pinned to a nowcast run so their tiles can be cached.
Full Changelog: v3.11.0...v3.12.0