This New App Will Change How You Track Weather

Introducing you to TitanTrack, our new free app available everywhere today.

Today, on Tornado Titans’ 17th birthday, we’re officially launching TitanTrack, a new online weather experience available now on desktop and mobile devices. TitanTrack lets weather enthusiasts combine live atmospheric layers, inspect individual storms, and understand what the atmosphere is doing, not simply watch radar returns move across a map.

Most weather apps show you products. TitanTrack helps you combine them, interrogate storms, and understand why the atmosphere behaves the way it does.

The goal of TitanTrack is to make tracking weather events accessible for every weather enthusiast, and it contains the DNA of our educational instincts so you might just learn a thing or two along the way. Enjoy the process of stacking layers and seeing how different ingredients interact in real time, while also monitoring a storm's internal metrics and how they change.

We’ve built every part of TitanTrack for weather enthusiasts like us, people who want more than the standard weather app, want to understand events as they unfold, and don’t mind trying something genuinely different.

I suspect that’ll be something some folks won’t enjoy as much, and if so, that is ok! The wonderful thing about the weather app space is that there is enough variety for everyone; this is just our entry.

Here are five things that TitanTrack can do that I particularly enjoy:

1) Stacking Layers in Real Time

TitanTrack isn’t a full-tilt radar app and has no intention of bringing full 3D volume scans into it. What it can do is combine several atmospheric layers at once to deliver real-time analysis and intel.

In the screenshot below, you can see 500 mb winds (mid-level jet stream winds) overlaid with real-time radar/warnings/watches and MLCAPE (a measure of instability).

2) Per-Cell Advanced Intel

Something I’m finding myself enjoying is the many ways to gather intel on a storm and what it’s up to. In the example below, you can see our four threat scores, which combine the storm cell’s internal dynamics with the environment and ground-truth reports to give a storm a score that lets you track its progress in real time. That makes it easier to see whether a storm is strengthening, weakening, or shifting toward a different primary hazard altogether.

You can track everything from the cell’s history to the environment it will move through during the next three hours.

3) Ensemble Forecast Models

One of the keys to the year-after-year success we’ve had in storm chasing is knowing how to use and decode ensemble models. We’ve included three in TitanTrack, with more to come on the model front.

But my favorite features have been our proprietary fields, which combine elements of the ensemble run to deliver intel you won’t find anywhere else. Think of it as an ensemble shortcut for people like me who would rather interpret one useful signal than mentally combine a dozen fields every time.

I highly recommend our SSI fields (Severe Storms Index), especially the base field — which combines the probability of storms on the REFS with the likelihood that severe weather ingredients overlap. It’s pretty rad.

4) Presets and Layer Controls

One of my favorite things to do in the app is switching between presets and quickly enabling different layers. I spent, admittedly, way too much time on this. This is only the first version, but even now I do think switching from Storms to Flooding to see the various products in a focused setting feels pretty nifty.

5) Our Boxed Soundings Regional Inspector

I needed to save my favorite feature for last.

I’ve always tried to point out to anyone who will listen the importance of collecting more data for soundings. I decided to make that the default method for analyzing the atmosphere in TitanTrack. But analyzing the atmosphere means having multiple tools at your disposal.

Our soundings take an entirely new path, with real language to explain what the sounding actually shows, perfect for the beginner storm tracker.

And our hodographs include multiple options, including the ability to set a manual right-mover motion to match what’s actually happening in the moment. Soon, you’ll be able to modify the entire sounding and choose between multiple models and even model blends to analyze what’s going on out there.

This Is The Beta Version

The roadmap for the future, first off, involves today’s critical step of a public release. However, this is only the beginning of the road for this product. This is a genuine beta. Some workflows will change, some features will need refinement, and we expect users to find things we missed. That feedback is part of why we’re opening it up now.

There’s much more coming to TitanTrack. And there’s a whole lot more this app does that I haven’t even begun to touch on, but will soon.

And I haven’t mentioned it yet, but we’ve also completely redesigned and rebuilt TornadoTitans.com and Titan U from the ground up.

We may be 17 years old, but we’re just getting started. Stay tuned for more exciting updates in the coming weeks!