About My Severe Weather Outlook
My Severe Weather Outlook is a site I’ve wanted to build for awhile.
It dates back as far as WickedWX (a severe weather site of mine that was eventually superseded by my work on severe weather outlook.com).
A spark of the idea was realized with the severe weather outlook site with a widget near the bottom of the page that will calculate the severe weather risk either by trying to guess your location via your IP address or by having you move the marker, as shown here:
The biggest problem with this has been the reliance on external services that correlate IP addresses with approximate locations. Services that often fail or go offline completely. Sure, you can drag your marker every time, but that’s not very fun. And even if it worked 100%, it wasn’t the entire idea.
I wanted something where you could just visit a page, and it would give you information tailored to you, not a general outlook for the US where you needed to figure out if you were impacted or not.
I had even built a prototype of this idea many years back, but it was slow to load and would’ve been ridiculously expensive to run for anyone other than just me.
But thanks to modern web technologies, I can finally start to realize my ancient idea on My Severe Weather Outlook.
This site is still pretty new as I write this, so I’d still suggest checking out the following for more information:
- severe weather outlook - the US-wide severe weather outlook, including the “Your Severe Outlook” featured in the image above
- tornado HQ - including a live page with tornado warnings and other severe thunderstorms.
- your local NWS office page - still the best place to get the most custom forecast including timing of severe threats