HRRR

HRRR is a native viewer for NOAA High-Resolution Rapid Refresh forecast fields. It renders surface smoke, two-metre temperature, total cloud cover, total precipitation, and one-hour precipitation over a locally indexed vector basemap. Forecast animation, map navigation, probes, and saved views remain responsive while network, GRIB, PMTiles, and mesh work run outside the UI thread.

Install

HRRR requires Rust 1.96 or newer, Linux/X11, and a working Vulkan graphics stack.

cargo install hrrr --locked
hrrr basemap install
hrrr

basemap install is explicit because it downloads several GiB. It obtains a pinned, SHA-256-verified go-pmtiles binary for the current platform, extracts the North American portion of the current Protomaps daily build, verifies the resulting PMTiles archive, and discards the extraction tool. The z12 archive is currently about 2.3 GiB. Pass a historical build date as hrrr basemap install YYYYMMDD.

Inspect or remove the basemap with:

hrrr basemap status
hrrr basemap remove

Linux/X11 is the sole current native-host coordinate. The tray implementation uses XEmbed; lack of a tray degrades window-close behavior to ordinary termination. Wayland, macOS, and Windows require proved Eternalist host projections before they can be claimed.

Use

Click an active field button again to show only the basemap. The arrow keys, forecast rail, Ctrl+R, and Ctrl+Shift+R select forecast time, the latest run, and the latest 48-hour run.

Drag to pan and scroll at the pointer to zoom. A left click moves the transient probe; Shift-left-click creates a persistent probe. Drag a persistent probe by its bulb and remove it with its adjacent ×. Esc clears the transient probe. Ctrl+Z undoes probe placement, movement, removal, and transient clearing. Map navigation and saved-view operations remain outside that history.

Every map position and persistent-probe set belongs to the active saved view and is autosaved. The + control clones the active view. Numeric keys select bound views; Shift plus a numeric key binds that slot to the active view.

Closing the window hides it only when Close minimizes is enabled and a tray is available. Left-click the tray icon to reveal the window; its context menu quits the process.

Storage

HRRR follows the host platform’s application-directory conventions. On Linux the defaults are:

Unset roots use the XDG defaults. Relative XDG roots are ignored. Set HRRR_BASEMAP_ARCHIVE to an absolute PMTiles path to use an externally managed archive.

Forecast cache entries expire after seven days and the cache is capped at 512 MiB. cargo uninstall hrrr removes the executable but preserves user preferences, views, and the explicitly installed basemap. Use hrrr basemap remove before uninstalling when that data should also be removed.

Data

Forecast data is fetched directly from the NOAA HRRR public archive. Basemap data comes from OpenStreetMap through Protomaps. Displayed forecasts are model output, not official warnings or observations.

Development

Run the non-mutating source gate with ./check.py verify. scripts/test-gui builds the optimized product twice, first ordinarily and then with its one-way test witness, and runs the complete native suite in private X11, XDG, process, network, and software-graphics namespaces. The stories prove inert launch; transient and persistent probes; restart restoration; pin drag and undo; and tray hide, reveal, menu, and quit behavior. Failure evidence is retained under /tmp/hrrr-acceptance-artifacts by default.

Native acceptance and ordinary-product CI share one declared coordinate: Linux/X11.

The UI vocabulary is a separately published dependency. When it changes, release it first with scripts/release-contract VERSION publish; only after that exact version is visible on crates.io may scripts/release VERSION publish seal the application. Both release commands require a clean, pushed main checkout and a valid signed tag at HEAD.

License

HRRR is distributed under the MIT License.