UK & Europe Rainfall Radar
This page refreshes automatically every 5 minutes • Press F5 at any time for the latest images
Animated Radar Charts
Animated from 3 hours ago to the present. These images cover the last 3 hours of rainfall across the UK and Europe. Click a chart to view it full size, and click again to close it.
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United Kingdom Rainfall, snow and cloud cover 
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Europe Rainfall radar — times shown in UTC 
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Interactive Rainfall Radar
Live animated rainfall radar for southern England and the UK. Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, and use the timeline at the bottom to step back through the last few hours. The map loads as you scroll down to it.
Drag to pan • Scroll to zoom
Infrared Satellite Image
Animated infrared satellite showing cloud patterns across the Atlantic and Europe. Bright white indicates high cold cloud tops associated with active weather systems. Updated every 15 minutes.
Live Lightning & Thunderstorm Tracker
Real-time lightning strikes detected across the UK and Europe by a community sensor network. Each flash on the map is a detected strike. Colours fade from bright yellow (recent) to red (older) as strikes age.
Community-operated real-time lightning detection network
About Weather Radar
Radar works by transmitting a pulse of radio waves and measuring the signal reflected back by objects in the atmosphere. Rain, snow and hail all return a signal — the heavier the precipitation, the stronger the return. By rotating the antenna and sending a continuous stream of pulses, a radar builds up a picture of precipitation across the surrounding area.
At longer ranges (typically beyond 100 km) accuracy reduces due to the curvature of the Earth. The radar beam rises above the surface, meaning it may miss rain at low altitudes or detect precipitation at height that never reaches the ground. Some ground echoes are also unavoidable — reflections from high terrain such as Snowdonia, the Pennines and the Lake District can appear on images even when no rain is present.