UPDATE: The new Enhanced Radar is now available on AccuWeather.com for free in a beta test format! If you'd like to comment on it, you can talk about it on our Forums. NOTE: The color table of the hi-res radar is not yet finalized; it will look more like the colors in the old radar soon, along with delineating Snow, Ice and Rain.

If you are an AccuWeather.com Premium or Professional subscriber, you've got to check out our new High-Res Radar in our new Enhanced Radar web page (this will all be added to the regular version of AccuWeather.com later this year). It totally kicks our old radar's butt, to be blunt. Below is a comparison of the two (from off the Carolina coast this afternoon):

The reason? Well, AccuWeather.com is primed to be the first public website to offer beta access to "Level II Super-Resolution" NEXRAD radar data (from the U.S. government, who provides radar data to all commercial companies) composited on to a U.S. map. "Level II" data is much higher resolution than the old "Level III" data, and it also has more colors. Let's take a closer look at the data once more.

The resolution change is obvious - the "pixels" (or, squares of data) on the new image are much smaller than on the old image. Note that, if you count the number of colors between the weakest and strongest signal (light blue or green to red). The old image only has 7, but the new one has more than twice that many (in fact it has the ability to have 10 times as many, as we refine it). The new radar image also uses the "pie slices" or "bins" inherent in the NEXRAD data, instead of trying to convert them to pixels, which makes the data more accurate and more like what you might see in front of you if you were a government radar operator.

To access this radar on Premium or Pro, click on the green "Enhanced Radar" button in your left-hand navigation, then choose "U.S. High-Res Radar BETA" from the "Image Type" dropdown menu (for more help on Enhanced Radar, including troubleshooting error messages or blank images, click the "Help" tab).

My former boss here at AccuWeather once labeled me "Radar Love Man" because of my fetish for weather radar data and products. To me, this is probably the biggest upgrade I've seen to AccuWeather.com's radar products since I started working here 11 years ago, and I'm thrilled to give you access to it at this early stage.* Below are some specifications on "Level II" and "Super-Res" NEXRAD radar data that I compiled while working on this project, which couldn't have been completed without the work of our talented radar experts both here at AccuWeather HQ and at our Wichita Office .

*DISCLAIMER: When using this new radar data, please be aware that we are offering it in a "Beta" format... the data can be subject to outages, as well as ground clutter or other anomalies. Super-resolution is not yet built into all government radars, and higher resolution may not be possible near the edge of radar scopes. Please continue to use our old Snow/Ice/Rain radar for your day-to-day weather observation and prediction.

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