What is UTC Time?
Weather observations around the world (including radar observations) are always taken with respect to a standard time. By convention, the world’s weather communities use a twenty four hour clock, similar to “military” time based on the 0° longitude meridian, also known as the Greenwich meridian. Prior to 1972, this time was called Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) but is now referred to as Coordinated Universal Time or Universal Time Coordinated (UTC). It is a coordinated time scale, maintained by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM). It is also known a “Z time” or “Zulu Time”. To obtain your local time here in the United States, you need to subtract a certain number of hours from UTC depending on how many time zones you are away from Greenwich (England). The table below shows the standard difference from UTC time to local time.
