HRRR
HRRR is a native viewer for NOAA High-Resolution Rapid Refresh forecast fields. It renders surface smoke, two-metre temperature, 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 and a working Vulkan, Metal, or DirectX 12 graphics stack.
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:
Linux and macOS are primary platforms. Windows is supported on a best-effort basis. The Linux tray implementation uses XEmbed under X11; lack of a tray degrades window-close behavior to ordinary termination.
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.
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:
| Meaning | Path |
|---|---|
| preferences | $XDG_CONFIG_HOME/hrrr/config.toml |
| saved views and basemap | $XDG_DATA_HOME/hrrr/ |
| session state | $XDG_STATE_HOME/hrrr/slate.toml |
| disposable forecasts | $XDG_CACHE_HOME/hrrr/fields/ |
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.
License
HRRR is distributed under the MIT License.