INTRODUCING STORMTRACK

A clearer view
of what’s heading
your way.

Weather is a big picture.
StormTrack brings it closer to home.

Explore nearby storms, official warnings, and projected storm motion in one simple, location-focused view.

Built for the browser. Focused on your location.

StormTrackPRODUCT PREVIEW
Illustration of a storm cell, an estimated motion corridor, and a selected location. This is sample weather, not live data.
Illustrative preview Not live weather data
ONE WEATHER FAMILY. TWO DIFFERENT VIEWS.StormTrack For your locationTortrak For the broadcast

01 / MEET STORMTRACK

Less searching.
More weather context.

Start with a place that matters to you. StormTrack puts the nearby weather in context, with clear source information and an honest view of uncertainty.

01

Your location, front and center.

Search a city or ZIP code, choose a point on the map, or optionally use your device location. See the outlook for the place you choose.

02

See the weather around you.

Explore nearby storm cells and timestamped radar imagery on an interactive map. Check when the observations were made.

03

Official warnings come first.

See National Weather Service tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings, their reported hazards, and the full bulletin.

04

Make sense of storm motion.

Explore estimated paths and possible arrival windows when the observations support them. Uncertain or outdated data is clearly identified.

05

Look beyond the next storm.

Open a five-day NWS forecast for your selected location, including day and night conditions, temperatures, and precipitation chances.

06

Choose your level of detail.

Use optional map tools to explore storm outlines and projected paths. Keep the view simple, or open more detail when you need it.

A CLEARER PICTURE STARTS WITH CLEAR SOURCES.NOAA storm data · NWS warnings & forecasts · IEM radar

IN DEVELOPMENT. COMING YOUR WAY.

Free early access.
Coming soon.

We’re getting StormTrack ready for its first public testers. Explore the features here and check back for the launch.

Free during early accessPublic access is not open yet
THE FUTURE HOME OF THE APPstorm.tortrak.com

Launch details will appear here.
No sign-up is required on this page.

02 / THE TORTRAK PLATFORM

The bigger picture.
Built for the broadcast.

Tortrak brings advanced radar, storm visualization, and production tools together for weather streams. It’s the broadcast and desktop side of the family.

Explore the full feature list
TORTRAK / BROADCAST WORKSPACEEXAMPLE SCREEN · NOT LIVE WEATHER
Example Tortrak broadcast workspace showing a national radar map, tornado warning banners, layer controls, and a scrolling alert ticker. Not live weather.
One workspace for the radar, the storm, and the story you’re telling.
Full-resolution radar

NEXRAD Level II, velocity, and dual-polarization products.

Six ways to see a storm

From point clouds to volumetric 3D visualization.

Made to go on air

Camera automation, warning graphics, and OBS-ready views.

Web & Windows

A browser workspace and a dedicated desktop experience.

Watch the Tortrak demo

Recorded Tortrak demonstration. Weather and warnings shown are examples, not current conditions.

03 / EXPLORE TORTRAK

Tools for every
part of the picture.

Explore the Tortrak feature library by category. These are Tortrak’s broadcast and desktop capabilities; StormTrack’s early access features are described above.

TORTRAK FEATURE LIBRARY

3D Storm Visualization11 features

Points

Every reflectivity gate rendered as a point cloud — the fastest mode, and the best big-picture view of overall storm shape and where the cores are.

Surface

A single solid shell colored by height, from blue at the base up to red and white at the top — echo tops and overhangs read at a glance.

Shells

Three nested, see-through reflectivity shells. A hot core glowing inside a lighter outer shell marks the heaviest rain or hail buried in the storm.

Velocity

Raw Doppler motion in 3D — green toward the radar, red away. Paired with Storm-Relative Motion, it's the primary rotation-hunting mode.

Volume

True volumetric rendering: the whole reflectivity field is ray-cast through the storm on the GPU for a smooth, glowing look. A drag-to-draw color curve — with GR2, Ramp, Core, and Hail presets — strips away the surrounding rain to expose a hook or hail core, live.

Vel·Vol — Velocity Volume

The same ray-marched rendering applied to Doppler velocity, using the familiar red/green inbound-outbound colors. Paint the curve asymmetrically to isolate just one side of a couplet, in full 3D.

3D Vortex Detection

TorTrak automatically hunts every volume for a stacked rotation signature and renders it as a glowing tube through the storm, colored by strength from base to top — visibly tightening and deepening as you loop through recent scans.

Storm-Relative Motion (SRM)

Dial in a storm's own motion and the 3D velocity views subtract it out, flattening the ambient wind field so a tight rotational couplet stands out on its own.

3D Time-Lapse

Step back through recent volumes in full 3D, in any mode, to watch a storm's structure evolve rather than looking at one freeze-frame.

Live Display Controls

Adjustable threshold, vertical exaggeration, and point size — all live, while rotating and panning the scene.

Terrain Shadow In testing

A beam-blockage layer that shades where mountains hide a radar's lowest scan is built and tested, and on its way back in after a final accuracy review.

Live Radar Engine15 features

Live NEXRAD Level II

Full-resolution, single-site data — not just the coarser national mosaic: base reflectivity, storm-relative velocity, and dual-polarization correlation coefficient, decoded straight from NOAA's real-time feed.

Debris Signature Detection

Correlation coefficient is a selectable product on its own, and CellTracker watches it automatically — a drop in CC coinciding with a rotation couplet flags a likely tornado debris signature: radar evidence a tornado is on the ground.

Full Product Menu

CONUS composite, single-site super-res reflectivity, storm-relative velocity, correlation coefficient, echo tops, GOES satellite, and HRRR forecast reflectivity — one control bar, each with a correctly scaled legend.

HRRR Forecast Overlay

NCEP's HRRR model, hourly out to 18 hours on one model run — plain, or color-coded by precipitation type — clearly badged as a forecast so it's never confused with a live observation.

LiveSweep

An optional classic "painting" radar renderer: a beam glides slowly around the scope revealing fresh data as it goes, the way a real WSR-88D scope looks.

Full Radar Control Bar

Loop playback with adjustable speed and opacity, crisp-vs-smoothed rendering, a minimum-reflectivity noise gate, auto-follow-nearest-site or lock-to-site, and auto-dim under warning fills.

Two-Site Mosaic

Blends your primary radar site with a second, user-picked site into one seamless composite — ideal for storms at the edge of one tower's range.

Quad View

A synced 2×2 wall — composite, super-res reflectivity, velocity, and echo tops — sharing one camera, built for tornado-confirmation segments.

Radar Cross-Section

Click two points across a storm for an RHI-style vertical slice through every tilt — hook echoes and hail cores aloft, on a flat chart.

Velocity Probe

Hover anywhere on the velocity field for the exact Doppler wind speed and direction under the cursor, read from the real decoded value.

Display-Level Dealiasing

Extreme Doppler velocities automatically unfold so they display correctly instead of wrapping to the wrong color.

Station Health & Auto-Failover

Every radar site's status — live, stale, or down — is monitored continuously, with automatic failover to the nearest producing tower and an honest on-screen badge.

Background Pre-Caching

Nearby high-threat radar sites are quietly pre-loaded in the background, so switching to them on air is instant.

Low-Latency Push Pipeline

Behind the scenes, new Level II data is pushed the moment it lands rather than waiting on the next poll.

Custom Dark-Amber Basemap

A purpose-built map style tuned for radar contrast and on-stream legibility.

Storm Detection & Analytics6 features

CellTracker

Persistent storm-cell tracking: every cell keeps a stable ID and a rotation tier that survives scan to scan, so you're watching one storm's evolution, not a new blob every volume.

Smoother Rotation Tracking

Between radar scans, a cell's marker now glides along its own measured motion instead of freezing in place — and snaps back the instant fresh data lands.

Storm Tracker

Draws each warned storm's motion vector and pulse rings, tracked forward between official updates so the marker never lags a fast-moving storm.

National Threat Index

A single, constantly-updating nationwide severe-weather score, charted over the last 12 hours — weighted so a long tail of flood warnings can't outweigh an actual tornado outbreak.

Storm Track Impact

Click a warning and TorTrak projects the storm's next two hours and lists every town in its path with distance and estimated arrival time.

Custom Watch Area

Draw your own box anywhere on the map for an instant severe-weather probability read on that specific area.

Warnings, Alerts & the Signature Interface13 features

NWS Warning & Watch Ingestion

Live tornado, severe thunderstorm, flash flood, and related warnings straight from the National Weather Service, with full text, timing, and tags like PDS and Tornado Emergency.

Storm Signature Interface

The interface changes color with the highest warning level in view: clear, watch, severe, tornado, confirmed tornado, and tornado emergency. A consistent visual language carries through to floating analytics panels.

Storm-Reactive Particle Effects

An ambient particle layer that changes with the threat level — calm on a quiet day, rain for severe storms, wind-blown debris for a tornado warning — with eight selectable calm-day looks, from snow to fireflies to falling leaves.

Voice Alerts

Text-to-speech announcements for new and updated warnings, with a priority queue, change detection, and an optional natural-sounding neural voice.

Voice History Console

A running, reviewable log of everything the voice engine has said, and when.

Sound Alerts

Distinct alert tones layered alongside or instead of the spoken voice alerts.

Toast Notifications

Transient, color-coded cards announcing new warnings visually, whether or not sound is on.

Broadcast Ticker

A bottom-of-screen crawl cycling through every active warning and watch, color-coded, with live alert counts.

SLAM Banner

A full-width animated banner that takes over the screen the moment a high-impact warning is issued or upgraded.

Threat Ambience

A subtle edge-of-screen glow that shifts with the worst warning nationwide.

Auto-Toast

A sticky card that always shows whatever storm the AI camera is currently on.

Auto-Zoom

Optionally fly the map to every new tornado warning or emergency, automatically.

SPC Watches & Watch Probabilities

Official Tornado and Severe Thunderstorm Watch boxes, plus the SPC's own probability breakdown for each — chance of tornadoes, damaging wind, and large hail.

AI Broadcast Camera2 features

Autopilot

A hands-free camera with three modes — off, tornado-only, or tornado+severe — that cuts to new warnings, tours the active ones, and settles back to a national view when it's quiet. Grab the map and it hands control right back.

Director

A step up: an AI camera that continuously scores every storm in the country and stays locked onto the single most dangerous one, only cutting away once another storm clearly overtakes it.

Fire Weather Tracking6 features

Fire Alerts

Red Flag Warnings, Fire Weather Watches, and Fire Warnings on the map, in their own amber/brown palette so they never read as storm products.

SPC Fire Weather Outlook

Day 1 and Day 2 categorical fire risk — Elevated, Critical, Extremely Critical — plus dry-thunderstorm risk areas.

Live Wildfire Incidents & Perimeters

Named, active wildfires with acreage and percent-contained, plus their mapped perimeters, from the National Interagency Fire Center.

Satellite Hotspot Detection

NASA satellite-detected heat sources, updating continuously once enabled.

Click-for-Detail

Every fire layer is clickable — incident name, acreage, containment, hotspot intensity, and detection time, all in one card.

Fully Isolated by Design

Fire activity never inflates the warning count, moves the National Threat Index, or triggers the on-air chrome — it runs quietly alongside tornado coverage without competing for attention.

Additional Hazard & Data Layers11 features

Hurricane Tracking

Active tropical system positions, forecast cone, forecast track, and wind radii straight from the National Hurricane Center.

Lightning

Real-time strike data, aged and faded by how recently each strike happened.

Rotation Tracks & Hail Swaths

NOAA's rotation-track and maximum-hail-size products, switchable between 1-hour and 24-hour windows — a tornado's path paints in as it happens.

ProbSevere

Per-storm, model-driven probabilities of tornado, hail, and wind risk, with a full breakdown on click.

Satellite

GOES true-color and infrared imagery layered under the radar.

Power Outages

Near-real-time utility outage territories, useful for correlating storm damage with what's actually losing power.

SPC Outlooks & Mesoscale Discussions

Day 1 categorical and probabilistic severe outlooks, plus SPC's own mesoscale discussions.

SPC Mesoanalysis Panel

Hourly CAPE, shear, helicity, and composite-parameter fields for any region, auto-refreshing.

Wind Flow

An animated, windy.com-style layer showing the current surface wind field across the country.

Local Storm Reports & Hail Chart

Same-day tornado, wind, and hail reports, plus a running chart of today's hail sizes.

Model Sounding

Right-click anywhere for a forecast sounding and computed severe-weather indices at that exact spot.

Historical Data & Replay4 features

Tornado History Archive

A searchable browser of decades of historical tornado tracks, filterable by year and EF-scale rating.

Tornado Ghosts

Significant historical tornado tracks fade in automatically near an active warning — instant "this is paralleling that year's storm" context.

Replay

A time machine for any past date: archived radar re-animated in sync with how the warnings actually evolved, clearly badged so it's never mistaken for live.

Reel

One-click recap video generation — drives Replay through a chosen window and records a fully composited broadcast frame straight to a downloadable video.

Map Tools5 features

Measure & Storm ETA

A distance ruler, plus a tool that reads a storm's real motion and computes closing speed and arrival time at any point you click.

Draw (Telestrator)

TV-meteorologist-style annotation — pen, arrows, circles, and text — glued to the geography as you pan and zoom.

Context Menu

Right-click anywhere for exact coordinates, to save a named location, or to jump to the nearest radar sites.

Place Search

Fast city, state, or ZIP lookup to fly anywhere in the country.

Unified Click Popup

One click, one answer, even where several layers overlap.

Streaming & Broadcast Production7 features

Vertical Stream Mode

A portrait 9:16 layout for TikTok Live and Shorts-style vertical capture, with the interface automatically rearranging to fit.

OBS-Ready Presets & Hotkeys

Every major layer and setting is controllable by URL, so a pinned streaming bookmark always looks the same — plus a full hotkey set and a clean mode that strips all chrome down to a pure map for a browser-source overlay.

Rehearsal Mode

A one-click broadcast rehearsal that fires the ticker, banners, and toasts with realistic fake data, so the whole on-air look can be tested with zero actual weather happening.

Brand Panel

A floating, draggable, resizable logo overlay.

Floating Panels Everywhere

Key panels detach, float, resize, and collapse independently, remembering position between sessions — and one key clears every open popup and tool at once.

Multi-Timezone Clock

Defaults to Central and UTC, expandable to every U.S. time zone — handy when a national audience is watching a storm in someone else's time.

Access Gate

A simple access-code lock on the hosted web version, so it isn't casually indexed or shared.

Desktop App Platform5 features

Native Windows App

The same features as the web version, running as its own window with a taskbar icon and a one-click installer.

Capture-Proof Rendering

Covering the window entirely with capture software never pauses the radar loop, ticker, or particle effects — a common browser limitation this eliminates outright.

Power-Save Blocker

Stops Windows from suspending the app mid-stream.

Private by Design

No URL at all — nothing hosted, indexed, or shareable the way a web address can be.

Window Memory

Remembers window size and position across restarts, so relaunching mid-stream reopens exactly the shape your capture software expects.

A FEW THINGS TO KNOW

A little clarity
before the clouds.

How are StormTrack and Tortrak different?

StormTrack is a location-focused weather tool for exploring nearby storms, official warnings, and projected motion. Tortrak is the advanced broadcast and desktop platform, with 3D radar, camera automation, and on-air production tools. This website introduces both.

When can I try StormTrack?

Free early access is coming soon. Public access is not open yet, and a launch date has not been announced. This page will be updated when it is ready.

Will early access be free?

Yes. StormTrack’s current early access features will be free during development. Future plans and additional capabilities may follow; there are no subscriptions or payments on this site.

What area does StormTrack cover?

Storm paths cover the contiguous United States. The current warning view includes NWS tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings. It does not include every type of weather alert.

Does StormTrack replace emergency alerts?

No. StormTrack is an experimental weather exploration tool, not an emergency alert service, and it does not send push alerts. Projections assume continued motion; storms can change quickly. Follow official NWS instructions and keep another way to receive warnings.

Website privacy

We keep owner-only aggregate page counts, broad device classes and referral categories. We do not retain visitor identifiers, IP addresses, full URLs or browser fingerprints in analytics. Hourly summaries expire after seven days and daily summaries after 400 days; aggregate backups expire within seven more days. There is no third-party analytics script. Operational request/error counts are separate. Separate security records may retain source IP addresses and minimal endpoint/error information for up to 14 days to investigate abuse. They exclude request bodies, precise locations, credentials and query strings, have no automatic backups, and are never joined to product analytics. Security protection remains active when optional analytics is off.

Global Privacy Control and Do Not Track are respected. This preference uses a simple on/off cookie for this site, not a visitor identifier. With JavaScript disabled, browser privacy signals still apply.