RadarOmega: Advanced Storm Tracking Toolkit

Omega's radar has a 14-day archive and is available as a paid service. Radar image updates are every 6 minutes, with colored flags indicating storm intensity, and a storm "eye." The Radar screen can be accessed by tapping the "Radar" icon at the upper right of the home screen. Radar utilizes the model-based LSMX radar to display precipitation amounts in 1,000s of millimeters, with white indicating light rain, orange, red, and purple indicating increasingly higher amounts of precipitation, with purple indicating that the precipitation is greater than 25mm/hour. Storms appear as a blue/green funnel if over land, and a light blue if over water, with all three of these colors indicating increasing intensity.

Display

The Radar screen displays a detailed rundown of the forecasted weather. As well as showing the model run times and the weather at different elevations, it also displays a forecast of the 1, 3, and 12-hour weather. Storm tracks are also shown, with blue showing storm tracks, and yellow showing lightning.

The Radar screen includes a severe weather ticker at the bottom of the screen, showing severe weather warnings, watches and advisories, and the radar imagery name. The radar imagery name and the model run times are also displayed on the upper left of the screen.

Weather Underground allows you to get weather data for any location in the world. To get the weather data, you need to enter the name of the nearest city, or enter the correct latitude and longitude. Weather Underground provides radar images at certain intervals, showing the past 24 hours of precipitation, and storm tracks with either white or blue behind each storm. If a storm falls below a certain thunderstorm threshold, it will turn yellow. If a storm reaches a certain threshold, it will turn red.

Pros:

- Extremely high quality and reliability of tracking services
- Very simple and convenient location manager
- Ability to customize data display in real-time according to your own needs
- Custom layer settings and an unlimited range of visual elements
- Possibility to add custom data sets to your map
- Fully optimized for mobile devices
- User-friendly interface
- It is the best solution for professional and amateur storm chasers

Cons:

- It is pretty expensive
- Installation and setup can be tricky
- Requires a powerful server

Final Thoughts

Overall a very good toolkit for the money, it has all the essentials and a whole bunch of extras, but it does lack some vital information that may hamper it for some. I would definitely use this over any other storm chasing toolkit for its sheer amount of information that it provides and ease of use, I would love to see some specific storm spotting information though.