In short
The Rain Radar shows live Bureau of Meteorology rainfall over your area, with a short timeline you can play back and forward. Use it to see whether rain is actually heading your way, from how far off, and how fast it's moving.
A forecast tells you the chance of rain today. The radar tells you where the rain actually is, right now, and which way it's drifting. That difference matters when you're deciding whether to launch, paddle out, or just wait twenty minutes for a passing shower to clear.
Reading the colours
Colour is intensity. Light blue or green is drizzle and light rain, yellow and orange is heavier rain, and red through to purple is intense, often thundery rain. A blob doesn't tell you much on its own; watch it for a couple of frames and you'll see whether it's building, weakening, or simply sliding past.
The timeline
The bar along the bottom is the important part. It plays back the last few hours of radar so you can watch a system's actual track and speed, rather than guessing from a single frame. Drag it yourself to step through history, or let it run and watch the pattern repeat.
Easy to miss
- The layers icon on the timeline toggles how solid the radar looks against the map underneath, which is handy for checking whether rain is sitting over water, over land, or right on your stretch of coast.
- Range presets sit above the map: 50, 100, 200 and 500 km, plus custom distances out to 4000 km for a whole-continent view of an approaching front.
- A pin icon lets you save favourite spots so you can flick between the places you actually care about instead of re-searching each time.
- National and state mosaic links near the bottom jump you out to the bigger picture when a local view isn't enough.
Good to know
The wider views are a mosaic of several separate Bureau radars stitched together, so on rare occasions you might notice a faint seam where two stations' coverage meets. That's a stitching artefact, not missing rain.
Related reading
For a deeper dive into radar colours and storm cells generally, see How to Read Australian Weather Radar . If you've ever wondered why the radar shows rain when the sky looks clear, see Why does the Rain Radar show rain when it isn't actually raining?