There are a few new things that have been added to RadarLab HD in Version 1.0 Revision 15. All the changes in this release can be found in here.
1. The 'Smooth Radar' check box has been added just above the buttons on the control panel. When the "Smooth Radar" is checked, the normal, smoothed radar image will be displayed. This is the radar image that has always been displayed. When the 'Smooth Radar' is unchecked, it will load the non-smoothed radar images.
2. The 'Sound Alarm' check box has been added just above the buttons on the control panel. The 'Sound Alarm' check box will turn the alarming off/on. The Alarming can be set by going to the 'Alarm Settings' tab on the 'RadarLab HD Settings' window. This window list the different types of weather phenomena that you can have RadarLab HD alarm on. There is a 'Turn Alarming On' and 'Draw Alarm Range Ring' check box on this window that allows you to set these as default values. That way, alarming can be turned on every time you launch RadarLab HD.
3. The 'Watch/Warning/Advisory' data layer has been split into three separate layers. These are 'Watches', 'Warnings' and 'Advisories'. This way people can turn each one on or off instead of displaying all of them at once. Because of this, a change was made to the 'WWA Legend'. This now shows all the colors of the different Watches, Warnings and Advisories. As of October 2007, some warnings will be displayed using the Storm Based Warning polygon that the National Weather Service has implemented. This means that the warning areas will be defined as polygons and not county or zone boundaries. Not all warnings will be displayed this way, but the severe ones such as Tornado and Severe Thunderstorm warnings will be.
4. A new Layers tab has been added called 'Radar'. This will contain all the different types of Radar that can be displayed. Currently, only base reflectivity is offered but more will be offered with the next RadarLab HD update. So the 'Radar' check box has been moved from the 'Data' layer to the new 'Radar' layer. The name has been changed from 'Radar' to 'Base Reflectivity'.
5. To accommodate the new 'Radar' tab, the width of the application has changed from 943 pixels to 990. If you see that the control panel is 'cut off' or not displayed properly when you launch RadarLab HD, it will be because of the increase in width. This should only happen if you are launching the program from your desktop short cut and not the web site. The width and height information is stored in the JNLP file that gets downloaded from our web site when you click on a RadarLab HD link. You may need to delete your Java cache to remove the old JNLP file that is on your computer. This should cause the width to come up correctly.
6. The 'Auto Refresh' option can now be set as a default parameter by clicking on the 'Settings' button. This will allow RadarLab HD to have 'Auto Refresh' checked every time you launch it.