Topeka Weather Gets Severe-Weather Alerts, 2-Hour Radar & Share Cards

The Topeka Weather page just got a meaningful upgrade. The biggest addition is a live NWS active-alerts banner at the top of the page — watches, warnings, and advisories for the Topeka grid point now appear the moment the National Weather Service issues them, color-coded by severity and auto-refreshed every 5 minutes. For a town in the heart of Kansas, that's the single most useful thing a weather page can do.

The Doppler radar playback window doubled from ~65 minutes to 2 hours (~28 NEXRAD scans), so you can track a storm system's full approach, not just the last hour. A new radar opacity slider lets you dial the reflectivity layer up or down to read weak echoes against the basemap.

Under the hood: the page now pauses polling and playback when the tab is hidden (no more background battery drain), fast radar scrubbing no longer drops frames, and the broken social-share image is fixed with a fresh AI-generated supercell hero card. A pile of dead code from earlier iterations — an unused PHP/MySQL collector, a superseded radar module, and a stale backup — was removed from the public web root.

Everything still runs keyless: Open-Meteo, the NWS API, and the Iowa Environmental Mesonet. Check it out.