A whole weather office’s worth of tools, minus the burnt coffee. Basic Radar comes with the software: view-only live reflectivity and velocity (lowest two beam angles, 12-frame loop), NOAA satellite lightning, NWS watches and warnings with alert sounds, Will It Hit Me?, NOAA Weather Radio, map layers, the distance tool and Quick Lessons. Everything else is Full LightningWX, the subscription. The 5-day trial includes all of it, except saving and recording, which need a paid license.
Every U.S. radar site, about 15 seconds behind real time, polling from every 30 seconds to 10 minutes. Here is the May 20, 2013 Moore, Oklahoma tornado: the hook echo, the debris ball, the whole terrible textbook. Included in Basic Radar (lowest two beam angles, 12-frame loop).
Radar, Wind, True Wind, Turbulence, Drop Shape, Debris, Heavy Rain and What’s Falling, each with a legend in words like Light, Heavy and Hail. Velocity and dual-pol, minus the decoder ring.
Full Storm, Height, Water Load, Rain Rate, Hail Size, Hail Chance and Hail Density. How tall, how wet and how much ice, one button each.
One, two, four or five panes, each with its own product and beam angle, all looping together.
Slice a storm top to bottom, watch one column of air change over the whole loop, and read the winds aloft from the radar itself.
Any date since 1991, for case studies and replays: hurricanes, derechos, hailstorms and the tornadoes every forecaster still talks about. Unlimited on-disk history of what you watched live.
Mesocyclone, strong rotation, tornado vortex signature and tornado debris, tracked scan to scan with rotation tracks from 30 minutes to 2 hours, plus the official NWS detections beside ours.
One card per storm: hail, rotation, storm-top trend, lightning rate and the near-storm environment, ranked by threat and explained in a sentence. Lightning Jump flags a sudden climb in flash rate, which often comes before severe weather.
Time until a storm reaches your saved or GPS location, and how close it is likely to pass. Included in Basic Radar, because that is the question everybody actually asks.
22 alert types with their own sounds and pop-up settings, warning polygons on the map, and the NWS text products behind them. Watches, warnings and alert sounds are included in Basic Radar; text products are part of the subscription.
A WarnGen-style trainer: pick a storm, draw the polygon and preview a warning in NWS format. It never issues anything; it teaches how forecasters do.
NOAA GOES satellite lightning, always drawn on top, with Satellite View (visible, GeoColor or infrared) under the radar. Lightning is included in Basic Radar.
Our own model: lightning chance for the next 30 and 60 minutes and forecast radar out to two hours, checking itself against real lightning every scan and getting better at your radar over time.
HRRR and GFS maps, hourly forecasts at any point, and Skew-T soundings from weather balloons or the model, with a plain-English verdict.
A full-window map module with 38 model fields, NASA satellite layers, animated wind and space weather.
Surface stations, upper-air reports and radar rainfall totals from 1 hour to 3 days, right on the radar map.
Active NHC storms, cone, watches and warnings, spaghetti models, intensity guidance and wind arrival times at your location. Tropical warnings themselves stay free in NWS alerts.
NOAA MRMS national radar, hail swaths, rotation tracks, echo tops and rainfall, every radar in the country stitched into one map.
16 units, 61 lessons, quizzes, a final exam, about 490 glossary terms and your own book, with buttons that open the tool each lesson is about. Quick Lessons are free in Basic Radar.
A case library of real events and a storm generator for teaching: supercells, hurricane landfalls and tornado tracks, no live storm required. Everything simulated is labeled as simulated.
Camera and radar panes, lower thirds and an alerts ticker for streaming.
A round-the-clock camera stream with your weather on the picture, restarting itself if the connection drops. Streaming and recording need a paid license.
Roads, counties, cities and your own GIS layers, plus a distance tool. Included in Basic Radar.
Connect your backyard station to see, chart and share its readings next to the radar.
Claude or ChatGPT beside the radar, with one-click hand-off of what you’re looking at, and AI control of LightningWX. Don’t be like me and argue with Claude for ten minutes because it wanted to talk about cloud physics instead of switching radars. You ask once, and if it wanders off, ask again. It’s completely experimental and not guaranteed to cooperate; they’re their own people.
The October 10, 2018 landfall on the Florida Panhandle, replayed from recorded radar in Simulation Mode. Every case in the library is real data you can loop, slice and study.
I’m building a photoreal 3D storm viewer that puts the radar into real terrain. It isn’t part of LightningWX today, and when it’s ready it will be an optional add-on. No dates and no prices yet: I’d rather show you than promise you.
LightningWX is a tool for learning and watching weather. It is not an official warning source. When the National Weather Service issues a warning for your area, follow it and your local emergency officials.
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