See the storm differentlyTorTrak
A live tornado and severe-weather tracking platform built for broadcasting — full NEXRAD Level II radar, automatic storm-cell detection, an AI-directed camera, six 3D storm-visualization modes, and a growing set of hazard layers. Runs as a web app or a native Windows desktop app.
The same color language the app uses on air — see Storm Signature Interface below.One live view. Every signal that matters.
TorTrak combines raw radar, warning intelligence, automated storm tracking, and on-air production tools into one purpose-built command surface.
What's New This Week
July 31 – August 4, 2026
Volumetric 3D RadarNEW
Two new 3D modes — Volume and Vel·Vol — bring true GPU ray-cast rendering to the storm view, the same technique GR2Analyst uses for its glowing look.
Fire Weather TrackingNEW
An entirely new hazard layer: Red Flag Warnings, the SPC fire outlook, live wildfire incidents, and satellite hotspot detection.
Storm Signature InterfaceNEW
The whole app — including the floating analytics panels — now shifts color with the worst warning currently in view.
Reworked Particle EffectsNEW
Cleaner debris, rain, and spark tiers by warning level, plus eight selectable calm-day looks for quiet skies.
Smoother Storm TrackingNEW
Rotation markers now glide between radar scans instead of jumping, and warning-pulse markers track forward between official updates.
Velocity DealiasingNEW
Extreme Doppler velocities now display correctly instead of wrapping to the wrong color.
New Dark-Amber BasemapNEW
A custom map style tuned specifically for radar contrast and on-stream legibility.
3D Storm Visualization
Six render modes turn any radar site's newest volume into a full, rotatable storm model — including this week's brand-new volumetric rendering.
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.
VolumeNEW
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 VolumeNEW
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 ShadowIN 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 Engine
The foundation everything else is built on: full-resolution NEXRAD Level II data, decoded and rendered in real time.
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 BasemapNEW
A purpose-built map style tuned for radar contrast and on-stream legibility.
Storm Detection & Analytics
TorTrak doesn't just show radar — it tracks storms as living objects and scores the overall threat.
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 TrackingNEW
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 Interface
Every official warning, announced clearly — and an interface that visibly reacts to how dangerous things get.
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 InterfaceNEW
The entire app changes color with the worst warning currently in view, so viewers learn what danger looks like after one stream.
Storm-Reactive Particle EffectsNEW
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 Camera
Hands-free coverage with real editorial judgment.
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 TrackingNEW
A brand-new second hazard domain, built alongside — and completely independent of — tornado coverage.
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 Layers
Beyond radar: the rest of the severe-weather picture, layered right on the map.
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 & Replay
Context from the past, and an instant recap of what just happened.
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 Tools
Everyday tools for reading and marking up the map on air.
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 Production
Built by a streamer, for streaming.
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 Platform
The same tracker, as a native Windows app built for long, uninterrupted streams.
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.
Built for Reliability
TorTrak is developed with an unusually rigorous testing discipline: every core system — radar decoding, warning logic, storm tracking, 3D rendering — is covered by automated tests. Stale data, dead radar sites, and feed outages always show up as a visible badge, never silently.