Posted on 07/06/2025 4:31:41 PM PDT by HonkyTonkMan
With the crazy weather we have been having (fires, floods, heat, etc). I thought it would be nice to start to a thread with recommendations for the sake of preparedness.
Recommendations
I am a premium member...because I had to have it. Free version is more than most people need anyway. Dozens of different overlays and all kinds of altitudes, temps, pressures, sounds, wind speeds etc. along with many different sources. Have the app on my phone and the website on a big monitor. Much faster than anything else at least for me. The radar on Accuweather is pretty good also but takes longer to load.
Bookmark
See my #21, they look bizarrely similar.
My mother had one of these. Turned it off because it ruined too many nights of sleep for basic thunderstorm warnings, or tornado watches and warnings that weren’t focused enough. Eventually, the need for sleep outweighed the possible benefits.
It's kind of like concealed carry; "This is the day I am scheduled to be carjacked, so I guess I'll bring my gun."
"Today is the day we are scheduled for a tornado. I guess I better turn on my NOAA weather radio."
The difference is sleep deprivation is a type of torture. Living in the South, hers would sometimes keep going off multiple nights in a row during some parts of the year. So your analogy isn’t quite sufficient.
National Weather Service - This one’s set for Salina Kansas. Enter “town,state” in the window. It will post watches and warnings on the radar maps. Scroll down.
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=38.8406&lon=-97.6124
Or you can start here
Again, watches and warnings are posted.
Operational Product Viewer. The whole country. Play with it a bit.
Someday you might wish she had had it on.
MyRadar is a really good app. Free, but you would have to pay for certain upgrades. If they say it’s going to rain in twenty minutes, it is.
Review
wow! that’s amazing picture, almost doesn’t look real except I have seen some unreal looking images of sky and land myself a few times, so I can imagine it is real and you were fortunate enough to experience it !
I look at MyRadar during our frequent thunderstorms here in Central Florida. I can see exactly how close the storm is and whether or not it has lightning associated with it.
MaxTracker is good for hurricanes and tropical storms.
I do follow him on YouTube.
Just monitoring the National Weather Service for your area will keep you informed.
Go go deeper and get behind the scenes info, click on “forecast discussion “ below .
You can sometimes see things they are seeing for trends before they put in the actual forecast .
Just put your town in to get it for your area:
https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=39.1127&lon=-94.6268
A weather rock is generally pretty accurate.
Great idea, thanks for the thread!
I agree about Ryan Hall, fantastic channel… just started using Weather Wise on his recommendation.
NWS ever since we lived off grid for 3 years. Have a Radio Shack Pro-92 handheld police/fire scanner with wx channels. Had no cell signal where we were but always managed to get NWS radio service. I still don’t have a decent cell signal so when it gets stormy and the power and internet are out, I’ll pull the scanner/wx out.
I use the NWS website too now of course and the app on my Android uses NWS - NWS Now I think is the name. Pay a few bucks to ditch the ads — I haven’t yet.
I use RadarScope and get the Pro version that shows lightning, which is critical when walking up to nestboxes on metal poles in flat, sparse terrain.
Our general rule is - if we can hear thunder - we stop our field research.
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