Hurricane & Typhoon Track

Living on the Gulf Coast taught me how quickly blue skies can twist into terror. Last evacuation season, frantic scrolling through unreliable weather sites left me paralyzed until a neighbor showed me Hurricane & Typhoon Track. That moment felt like someone finally handed me a flashlight in a collapsing basement.

The moment I launched the app during Tropical Storm Marco’s approach, its real-time tracking map became my command center. Watching crimson storm symbols crawl across the Caribbean with precise longitude/latitude coordinates, I finally understood the relief of data-driven decisions. When I tapped the forecast cone overlay, seeing the five-day probability path shrink toward our county triggered immediate action – we packed medication and documents hours before official warnings.

During Hurricane Laura’s landfall, the storm surge probability maps became my family’s lifeline. Huddled in an interior closet at 2AM, I zoomed into our neighborhood grid with pinch gestures despite shaky hands. The app highlighted our street in high-risk purple while displaying nearby emergency shelters. That visual clarity overrode panic; we knew exactly when to move to higher ground as rainwater began seeping under doors.

What stunned me most was the GOES satellite floater imagery. Watching Laura’s eye rotate in 10-minute increments felt like having a live helicopter feed. I shared looped radar sequences directly to our community Twitter group, the screenshots helping neighbors visualize wind field changes. When cell towers flickered, the offline historical maps still displayed evacuation routes from 2017’s storms – proving essential when digital road closures outdated paper maps.

The optional Model Viewer Add-On transformed how I interpret forecasts. Comparing spaghetti models during uncertain trajectories, I tapped individual European Centre vs. GFS projections to see divergence points. Seeing 70% of models cluster east of our farm last September gave me confidence to shelter in place rather than join gridlocked highways.

Two pain points surfaced during prolonged outages: the app’s battery drain during continuous satellite updates forced me to ration phone power, and I craved localized power grid status overlays beyond surge predictions. Still, when Cyclone Gabrielle approached, seeing National Hurricane Center advisories embedded beside crowd-sourced station data created unmatched situational awareness – worth every megabyte of data used.

For coastal residents, sailors, or anyone facing nature’s fury, this isn’t just an app. It’s the digital equivalent of storm shutters and sandbags. Keep it installed year-round; that random Tuesday disturbance could become tomorrow’s emergency.