Buienradar — Live Rain Radar & 7-Day Weather
Will it rain in the next hour? An animated rain radar of the past two hours, a 15-minute rain forecast with a dry-window planner and rain alerts, and a 7-day forecast with hourly detail. Works for any place on Earth; starts at your location or Brussels.
Guide — will it rain, and when?
The page starts at your location (if you allow it) or Brussels. Search a town, press ◎ My location, or click the map. Press ☆ Save place to keep it as a one-tap chip.
The bar at the top answers the question in one line: dry, rain starting in ~25 min or raining, stopping around 15:30, based on the 15-minute forecast for the next two hours.
The map plays the last two hours of radar in 10-minute steps. Watch which way the showers drift and how fast. Pause with space and step with ← →.
Under the rain chart, choose how long you'll be outside and within which time. The planner finds the start time with the least rain. Turn on the 🔔 rain alert to be warned 30 minutes ahead.
The 7-day strip shows each day's temperatures, rain and wind. Click a day for its hourly chart, and hover the chart for the exact numbers per hour.
Approximate rain rates for the radar colours, from the reflectivity (dBZ).
- beige
- drizzle, under 0.2 mm/h
- light blue
- light rain, about 0.5–1 mm/h
- dark blue
- moderate rain, 2–4 mm/h
- yellow–orange
- heavy rain, 5–25 mm/h
- red–pink
- cloudburst or hail, 50+ mm/h
They answer different questions, so use both.
- Radar
- where rain fell in the last 2 hours, measured
- Verdict
- the next 2 hours, from the 15-minute forecast
- Chart
- 1 to 24 hours ahead
- 7 days
- daily and hourly model forecast
Only in your browser, never on a server.
- Place
- the last place you looked at
- Saved
- up to 8 favourite places
- Units
- °C or °F · km/h, Beaufort, m/s or mph
- Link
- 🔗 Share copies a link to this place
When you're not typing in the search box.
- space
- play or pause the radar
- ← →
- previous or next radar frame
- /
- search a place
- L
- my location
- F
- fullscreen map
Free buienradar-style rain radar and weather forecast
This free buienradar-style page puts the questions you check the weather for on one screen. The verdict bar says whether it will rain in the next two hours. The animated rain radar shows the showers of the past two hours and where they are heading. A rain chart covers the next 1 to 24 hours, and a dry-window planner finds the best moment to leave. The 7-day forecast has hourly temperature, rain and wind for every day. It starts at your location, or in Brussels when you don't share it, and works for any place on Earth.
Is this the official Buienradar?
No. It is an independent page made by Jasper Bernaers and is not affiliated with Buienradar.nl or Buienradar.be. "Buienradar" (Dutch for shower radar) has become the everyday word in Belgium and the Netherlands for checking whether rain is coming. This page combines two open data sources: the global RainViewer radar composite for the map and the Open-Meteo weather API for every forecast. There are no ads, no account and no tracking cookies.
Where the radar data comes from
RainViewer merges the images of national weather radar networks into one worldwide map. Over Belgium these are the four Belgian radars: those of the Royal Meteorological Institute (KMI/IRM) at Wideumont (2001) and Jabbeke (2012), the radar of skeyes at Zaventem, and the newest one at Helchteren, owned by the Flemish Environment Agency (VMM). Radars of the neighbouring countries add to the picture. A weather radar sends out microwave pulses and measures how much is reflected by raindrops, snow and hail: the reflectivity, in dBZ. The Belgian radars give a new three-dimensional scan every five minutes. They measure rain quantitatively up to about 100 km from each radar.
Since 1 January 2026 RainViewer's free service offers only the past two hours in 10-minute steps, up to zoom level 7, in one colour scheme ("Universal Blue"). Its radar extrapolation into the future (the "nowcast") and its infrared satellite cloud layer were discontinued that day. That is why the timeline ends at the latest radar image, and why the map does not zoom in further. For what comes next, use the verdict, the rain chart and the planner, which come from the forecast models.
What the radar colours mean
The colours show reflectivity. The rain rates on the legend are an estimate using the classic Marshall–Palmer relation (Z = 200·R1.6): 20 dBZ is about 0.6 mm per hour, 30 dBZ about 3 mm/h, 40 dBZ about 12 mm/h and 50 dBZ about 50 mm/h. Each 10 dBZ step is roughly four times as much rain. Beige is drizzle, blue is light to moderate rain, yellow and orange are heavy showers, and red, pink and white are cloudbursts, usually with hail. Wet snow and hail reflect more strongly than rain, so in winter and in thunderstorms the real amount on the ground can be smaller than the colour suggests.
How accurate is the rain forecast for the next hours?
The verdict, the rain chart up to 2 hours and the planner use Open-Meteo's 15-minute precipitation forecast. For Belgium and the rest of Central Europe these are real 15-minute values from high-resolution models: ICON-D2 of the German weather service DWD and AROME of Météo-France. Elsewhere in the world the hourly forecast is spread over 15-minute steps, which is less precise. The 4, 8 and 24-hour views use hourly values. A model can put a shower in the right region but a few kilometres or half an hour off, especially with summer thunderstorms. So treat a minute-precise start time as a good estimate, and compare it with the movement you see on the radar.
How the dry-window planner works
Choose how long you need to be outside (15 minutes, half an hour or an hour) and within which period (2, 4 or 8 hours). The planner slides that window across the 15-minute forecast and adds up the expected rain for every possible start time. It shows the start time with the least rain, with the chance of rain in that window. If several start times are equally dry, the earliest wins, so a dry "go now" is never postponed. If none is dry, it says how wet the best option still is, so "can I cycle home dry?" becomes "leave at 17:45".
Rain alerts
Turn on 🔔 Rain alert and the page checks the forecast for your place every five minutes. When it is dry now and rain is expected within 30 minutes, you get a browser notification, or a message on the page if notifications are blocked. You get one alert per shower, not one every five minutes. The alert only works while the page is open in a tab: there is no server sending push messages. That is the price of a page that stores nothing about you.
Why the radar shows rain but it's dry outside (or the reverse)
A radar beam rises with distance because the Earth curves away underneath it, so far from a radar it measures rain hundreds or thousands of metres up. That rain can evaporate before it reaches the ground (virga), or drift with the wind and land a few kilometres further. Very local showers and drizzle from low clouds can slip under the beam. The newest radar image is also a few minutes old by the time it appears. Use the radar to see the trend, and the verdict and chart for your exact spot.
The 7-day forecast and hourly detail
Each day card shows the weather type, the highest and lowest temperature, the expected rain in millimetres with the highest hourly chance of rain, and the strongest wind. Click a day for the hourly chart: temperature line, rain bars and wind line, with sunrise and sunset. Hover or tap the chart to read the values for one hour. Open-Meteo's "best match" combines the most suitable national and global models for the location. Forecasts are most reliable for the first two or three days; after that, read them as a trend.
Units, places and sharing
Switch between °C and °F, and between wind in km/h, Beaufort, m/s or mph. Beaufort is the scale sailors and weather presenters use: force 4 is a moderate breeze, 20 to 28 km/h, and force 8 a gale, 62 to 74 km/h. Save up to eight places as chips above the map. 🔗 Share copies a link like /buienradar/?lat=51.05&lon=3.72&place=Ghent that opens the forecast for that place. Your last place, your saved places and your units are kept in your browser's local storage on this device only.
Private and free
The page runs in your browser. It asks the public APIs of RainViewer and Open-Meteo for radar images and forecasts, and BigDataCloud for the name of a place you click on the map. These requests contain the coordinates of the place you look at, but nothing that identifies you. Location access is only used to centre the map, and is never sent to a server of mine. Radar images refresh every 5 minutes and the forecast every 15 minutes (every 5 with the rain alert on).