TornadoPath.com

[Michael Donovan]

Hello! My name is Michael Donovan - I am totally new to this forum. I did a bit of research to find the best tornado forum - and this one kept coming up as having a great and long history of engaged storm chasers and weather enthusiasts/experts, so here I am! I'll jump right to the point - I've spent the past 6+ months building TornadoPath.com and, if folks are willing, I would love to get some feedback.

The idea behind TornadoPath is two fold 1. be one of the best places to go for LIVE tornado warnings and 2. be one of the best places to go for intersting historical tornado information. Lofty goals - and some really great resources in the space already, but thats the dream.

To that end, for the first goal of being the best place to go for live tornados - I built the US warning system to use the NWS Open Interface. This required account access from the NWS and some learning of the NWS-OI system, but ultimately it allows me to show warnings in as near real-time as possible. I fall back to the NWS API (can be ~3 min delayed) as a redundancy measure in the event the Open Interface goes down. I also use chron jobs to scrape CAP XML files from Environment Canada to show their warnings! To the best of my knowledge, TornadoPath is the only site that shows both US and Canada warnings in one place?

In regards to historical data, I use NWS data dating back to 1950 - imperfect of course but it was the cleanest data set I could find. I also found Canadian data through Western University that was in a similar format to NWS data set so that allowed me to structure the pages similarly. I am currently talking with Dr. Tanja Renko from the European Severe Storms Laboratory to try to work something out to add historical data from Europe! We'll see where that goes.

Ultimately I am a weather enthusiast and a data nerd, but far from an expert on tornados. Which is why I wanted to reach out to this long standing community for feedback, if you are willing. Are there things you would like to see changed? Or added? What could I do to make this more useful or more engaging?

Some thoughts I've had involve allowing users to comment, and or upload media per warning - logistically very challenging to moderate content and prove orgin etc. but we are visual people and that would add a lot to the site I think.

Looking forward to hearing from you. If I posted this in the wrong place I apologize!

Sincerely,
Michael

 

[Warren Faidley]

Welcome to the forum. I'm not an expert in historical data systems but I believe some people on ST are, so I'm sure they will chime in.

 

[JamesCaruso]

Hi Michael - happy to have you here. Glad to hear ST came up as a leading resource - I think you’ll find its community and depth of curated content to be far superior than the algorithmically-generated stream of sound, text and video morsels coming at you through social media feeds.

Similar to Warren, I’m no expert in the particular domain you are looking for feedback on. If you don’t get much response, don’t be discouraged - this forum in general is lower-volume but higher quality engagement. But the volume drops further in the offseason, so don’t hesitate to post in this thread again to float it to the top periodically, especially as the season approaches!

 

[Todd Lemery]

Once again, I’m no expert on tornado data, but I have a couple of thoughts. The first is that the juice won’t be worth the cheese on up to date tornado warnings. There’s already a lot of avenues for getting the tornado warnings.
The second is the historical data and interesting notes. While there are different ways to access the data, if a clean and easy to navigate option were available it would be breaking new ground as far as I’m concerned. For my two cents I’d like to see that.