IRIS Focus overview

IRIS Focus provides user-friendly, browser-based tools for viewing and analyzing weather data received from weather radars or lightning sensors. Weather data is overlaid on a geographical map.

In the case of weather radar data, the map is centered on a selected radar site or composite site. Radar data is gathered from a single weather radar or a network of radar sites.

With the zoomable and draggable animation timeline, you can easily visualize recent, past, or nowcasted data.

Nowcasting performs advection calculations on motion data from radar products to predict weather movement and severity up to 6 hours in the future.

Significant weather events such as thunderstorms, wind shear, or heavy rain are automatically detected and trigger alerts when they enter an area of interest.

Weather products

The displayed data typically consists of radar or lightning products. Radar products are raw signal data from a radar receiver processed to provide information about current weather conditions. Lightning products visualize data from a lightning sensor network.

Radar products measure information such as radar signal reflectivity or rain intensity for analysis by meteorologists. Lightning products visualize the type and amplitude of lightning events, for example.


On-demand products	On-demand products are based on raw data from the IRIS back-end systems (IRIS - Interactive Radar Information System and/or TLP - the Total Lightning Processor). IRIS Focus processes data and generates products in real time. On-demand products provide control over the presentation of weather data in the IRIS Focus user interface. For example, you can change the parameter threshold of a selected product on the fly. IRIS Focus users can create composites of on-demand products by selecting multiple radar sites from the radar site selector.
IRIS Analysis radar products	IRIS Analysis radar products are configured and produced in IRIS Analysis and displayed by IRIS Focus on request.
Lightning products	Lightning products are based on sensor data that is sent to a central processor, where lightning solutions are created and then sent to IRIS Focus in real-time for product generation and visualization.