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 a working wgpu-compatible graphics stack. Releases support Linux/X11, macOS 13 or newer on Apple Silicon and Intel, and 64-bit Windows.
On Linux, install the ordinary command-line package with Rust 1.96 or newer:
macOS uses the universal DMG. Drag HRRR into Applications. The image is not yet signed or notarized; macOS therefore requires the standard manual override for an unidentified developer.
Windows uses the per-user installer. It needs no administrator access and creates the normal Start Menu entry. The binary is not yet code-signed, so SmartScreen may require explicit approval.
First launch explains and offers the basemap installation. Approval downloads
about 1.1 GB and leaves a roughly 1.01 GiB North American map core available
offline through zoom 11. HRRR obtains a pinned, SHA-256-verified go-pmtiles
binary for the current platform, extracts the current Protomaps daily
build, verifies the result, and discards the tool.
At zoom 12, only visible detail tiles are fetched by HTTP range request. Those
tiles enter a 512 MiB, seven-day disposable cache; zoom 11 remains visible when
the detail source is unavailable.
The same operation remains available explicitly. A date pins both the local core and its lazy detail tier to a historical daily build:
Inspect or remove the basemap with:
Linux uses an XEmbed tray; lack of a tray degrades window-close behavior to ordinary termination. macOS and Windows use their native tray facilities. Linux/Wayland is not yet a release coordinate.
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. The platform roots are:
| Host | Persistent root | Disposable root |
|---|---|---|
| Linux | XDG config, data, and state roots under hrrr/ |
$XDG_CACHE_HOME/hrrr/ |
| macOS | ~/Library/Application Support/moe.swarm.hrrr/ |
~/Library/Caches/moe.swarm.hrrr/ |
| Windows | %APPDATA%\swarm\hrrr\ |
%LOCALAPPDATA%\swarm\hrrr\cache\ |
On Linux the individual 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 and detailed-basemap caches each expire after seven days and are each
capped at 512 MiB. Cargo, the macOS app bundle, and the Windows uninstaller
remove installed machinery while preserving preferences, views, and the
explicitly installed basemap. Run hrrr basemap remove first to remove the
local core and cached detail as well.
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 Linux suite in private X11, XDG, process,
network, and software-graphics namespaces. The stories prove inert launch;
field selection and restart restoration; transient and persistent probes; pin
drag and undo; and tray hide, reveal, menu, and quit behavior. Failure evidence
is retained under /tmp/hrrr-acceptance-artifacts by default.
The portability controller launches the real witnessed product on macOS arm64, macOS x86_64, and Windows x86_64. It requires CLI identity, native tray construction, a successfully presented GPU frame, the current HRRR witness contract, first-contact basemap consent, and the map surface. Installer jobs also forge a universal DMG and an NSIS package, install or mount the exact artifact, rerun the controller against the packaged executable, and prove uninstallation without user-data loss.
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. A version tag publishes the
installers only after every source, security, package, host, lifecycle, and
native-acceptance job passes.
License
HRRR is distributed under the MIT License.