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STORMTRAK / FREE EARLY ACCESS IS OPEN
A clearer view
of what’s heading
your way.
Weather is a big picture.
StormTrak brings it closer to home.
Explore nearby storms, official warnings, and projected storm motion in one simple, location-focused view.
Open now in your browser. No account or payment required.
StormTrakINSIDE STORMTRAK
01 / MEET STORMTRAK
Less searching.
More weather context.
Start with a place that matters to you. StormTrak puts the nearby weather in context, with clear source information and an honest view of uncertainty.
Live radar & playback
Explore timestamped NEXRAD imagery, replay recent radar frames, and see observed storm outlines and distances on an interactive map.
Official warnings & statements
Read NWS tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings, reported hazards, motion and full instructions. View Special Weather Statements, including text when no mapped area is available.
Storm direction & speed
See supported movement estimates with compass directions, map arrows and approximate speeds or speed ranges. Direction, speed and movement toward your location are assessed separately.
Rain & storm arrival context
See radar-indicated rain in your area, conditional projected arrival windows, or closest-approach time and distance when supported. Tracked storm cells also have their own projected-path assessment.
Current station conditions
Check nearby station temperature, humidity, dew point, heat index, wind speed, gusts and wind direction when reported, with the station name, distance and observation time.
Temperature & wind history
Explore 1-, 6-, 12- and 24-hour station history. Compare temperature with dew point and wind with reported gusts, inspect individual reports, and open the accessible data table.
Five-day local forecast
Open day and night NWS forecasts for your selected location, including temperatures, precipitation chances, detailed conditions and forecast issue time.
SPC severe-weather outlooks
Explore official severe-weather outlooks and tornado, hail and wind probability layers. See the outlook at your location with its issue time and valid period.
Your weather hot list
A location-focused briefing brings together active warnings, today’s severe and tornado outlook, and relevant forecast precipitation chances. Official warnings lead.
Advanced storm tools
Browse nearby warnings, optionally listen to a warning read aloud, and inspect selected-storm severe, tornado, hail and wind probabilities, radar-estimated hail and lightning details when available.
Check places along a path
Experimental tools assess downstream community centers or a map point using the selected storm’s projected path, arrival uncertainty and official warning context.
Control the map
Choose storm outlines and projected-path layers, focus on a storm and open deeper details in the Advanced drawer. Radar and warning layers have separate visibility controls.
Source times & uncertainty
See observation ages, delayed or unavailable data and clearly labeled historical direction context. Missing readings stay missing rather than becoming zero.
Explore & give feedback
Try a clearly labeled simulated example, read first-use guidance and location/privacy information, and report a problem inside the app. Early access needs no account or payment.
A CLEARER PICTURE STARTS WITH CLEAR SOURCES.NOAA / MRMS / ProbSevere · NWS / SPC · IEM radar
A CLOSER LOOK
Local conditions.
A little more history.
Open the conditions panel to explore station reports and trends. These supplied screenshots show recorded weather; tap any image to view it at full size.
Current conditions
Station readings, wind direction and the age of the report, together in one view.
Temperature history
Compare temperature and dew point, explore highs and lows, and inspect individual observations.
Wind history
Follow reported wind and gusts over time. Missing gust reports remain clearly identified.
History windows in the current app end at the latest returned station report. Screenshots may show an earlier interface.
BEHIND THE DIRECTION ARROW
How we estimate
where weather is moving.
StormTrak combines several kinds of evidence while keeping their sources distinct. The wind at a nearby weather station is not the same thing as a storm’s travel speed.
Compare real scans over time.
NOAA’s Multi-Radar/Multi-Sensor (MRMS) observations show where precipitation is occurring. Masked cross-correlation looks for the same rain pattern in successive scans. Its displacement and the actual elapsed time provide a direction and speed estimate.
Recent local matches are compared with regional and neighboring motion. Reverse matching, pattern changes and agreement across observations help determine how much confidence to place in each result.
Check motion against observations.
NOAA/CIMSS ProbSevere supplies storm objects and motion components. StormTrak checks consecutive observations for consistent identity, size, motion and position changes before using a cell’s projected path.
Spherical along-track and cross-track geometry relates that path to your selected location. A storm’s footprint and uncertainty matter, not just where its center is pointed.
Keep reported motion separate.
NWS warnings and Special Weather Statements can report storm positions, direction and speed. StormTrak labels these as reported information, with the original source time, separately from its radar estimates.
Official warnings and instructions take priority. A nearby warning’s motion is not automatically assigned to a radar object simply because the two are close.
Different evidence, different precision.
Direction, numeric speed, movement toward you and timing have separate evidence checks. That allows a useful broad direction even when a precise speed or arrival time is uncertain.
Supported radar footprints can produce conditional arrival windows or closest-approach estimates. Freshness, source age and location accuracy matter; storms can grow, split, merge or change course. Confidence labels are engineering assessments, not calibrated probabilities.
BUILT WITH REACT & MAPLIBRE GL JSWeather: NOAA / NWS / SPC / IEM · Maps: CARTO / OpenStreetMap · Places: GeoNames
OPEN NOW. FREE DURING DEVELOPMENT.
Free early access.
Now open.
Explore live radar, local conditions, official warnings and storm motion in your browser. Try StormTrak today and help shape what comes next.
START EXPLORINGOpen StormTrak free
Free early access is open at storm.tortrak.com.
Works on desktop and mobile browsers.
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 listTORTRAK / BROADCAST WORKSPACEEXAMPLE SCREEN · NOT LIVE WEATHER
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; StormTrak’s early access features are described above.
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 StormTrak and Tortrak different?
StormTrak 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 StormTrak?
Free early access is open now. Open StormTrak in your browser. No account or payment is required.
Will early access be free?
Yes. StormTrak’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 StormTrak cover?
Storm paths cover the contiguous United States. The warning view includes NWS tornado and severe thunderstorm warnings, with Special Weather Statements available separately. It does not include every type of weather alert.
Does StormTrak replace emergency alerts?
No. StormTrak 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.
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