Rain and hail seen by weather radar. Green is light, yellow and red are heavy, purple is hail. Updates every 5 minutes.
A dashed outline means the Storm Prediction Center thinks tornadoes or severe storms are possible there in the next few hours. A watch is a heads-up. A warning means it is happening now.
Dotted areas where a Storm Prediction Center forecaster is writing about storms right now, often an hour or two before a watch is issued. Tap one to read what they expect.
The Storm Prediction Center's severe weather outlook for today. Shaded areas run from marginal (light green) to high. Dashed red lines show tornado chances. Good for planning the day; the warnings above are what matter right now.
Where each warned storm is headed, from the speed and direction in the warning itself. Dashed outlines show the warning area 15 and 30 minutes from now; tick marks on the track are 15 minutes apart. Storms turn, so the edges are approximate.
Each outline is one thunderstorm as NOAA's ProbSevere system sees it, updated every 2 minutes. The color is the chance it produces a tornado in the next hour: grey under 3%, yellow, orange from 10%, red from 30%. Tap one for its rotation, hail and motion numbers.
Like a hurricane cone, for storm cells with a tornado chance of 10% or more and for any cell you tap. It covers where the cell's center is likely to be over the next hour, allowing for storms speeding up, slowing down or turning, with the clock time marked every 15 minutes. A wider cone means less certainty. It estimates where the cell's center goes (a tornado, if there is one, is much narrower than the cell). We score every cone against where the storm actually went.
Plays the last 50 minutes of radar so you can see which way storms are moving and whether they are growing.
Scrub back through the last three hours of radar, warnings and storm cells together, to see what passed over a place and when. Warnings show as they stood at that minute.
Adds the layers storm spotters use to pick out a tornado before it is confirmed: radar wind (velocity) from the nearest radar site, reports phoned in by trained spotters, and sharper single-site radar. Zoom in to a storm first.
Base velocity: which way the wind is blowing relative to the radar. Green is toward the radar, red is away. A tight spot where bright green and bright red touch is rotation, the signature of a possible tornado. It replaces the normal radar picture while it is on, and it only works within about 100 miles of the radar, so pick the nearest site.
Reflectivity from the single nearest radar instead of the national mosaic. Finer detail, so a hook shape on the southwest side of a storm, the classic tornado shape, is easier to see.
Tornadoes, funnel clouds, hail and wind damage reported to the Weather Service in the last 3 hours, mostly by trained spotters. Tap a marker for the report.
The path each rotating storm cell has taken over the last three hours, from ProbSevere's low-level rotation measurement at every two-minute scan. Brighter and wider means stronger rotation. This is per cell, not the full radar rotation grid, so a brief spin-up between scans can be missed.
What to look for: a hook on the southwest side of a storm on radar, green against red on radar wind, and a tornado warning tagged observed. Any one of them is reason to take shelter if the storm is coming your way.
For checking on a place once the storm has passed: every report from the last 24 hours, and the tornado paths the Weather Service has surveyed in the last two weeks, with the EF rating, length and width. Survey data is preliminary until the office finalizes it.