WONDERLANDstorm watch

initialising…

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falling down the rabbit hole…

> HOW THIS WORKS

The short version

This whole page is one program running on Cloudflare's network. There is no server behind it, no database, and nothing of it runs at home — which is the point. It was built to keep working on a phone, on cellular, with the house dark and every machine it was written on powered off.

Where the numbers come from

Everything is a free, public, keyless feed. None of it is scraped from anyone's app, and none of it is ours — we fetch official sources and arrange them.

Source	What it gives this page	Refresh
NHC CurrentStorms	active cyclones: position, intensity, pressure, movement	2 min
NHC forecast advisory	the fixed-format teletype — forecast track to 5 days, quadrant wind radii, peak gusts	5 min
NHC cone (KMZ)	the official 5-day cone polygon	15 min
NHC advisory archive	every past advisory, for the progression table	24 h (they never change)
NOAA tropical map service	potential storm-surge inundation for the live advisory	on demand
NWS api.weather.gov	warnings and watches, current observations, hourly and daily forecast, zone shapes	1–10 min
SPC day-1 outlook	severe and tornado risk areas, and whether you are inside one	30 min
FEMA NFHL	flood hazard zones	on demand
NDBC buoys	offshore wind, gusts, seas and pressure from the nearest marine buoys	10 min
NOAA CO‑OPS	water level at the nearest tide station	5 min
USGS waterservices	river gauge heights and their 6‑hour trend	15 min
US Navy JTWC	tropical cyclones in the basins NHC does not cover	30 min
RainViewer	radar and satellite tiles, 14 frames for the animation	1 min
zippopotam.us	turns a ZIP code into coordinates	24 h
Esri	the basemap underneath everything	—

How the page actually runs

Your browser asks this site for one bundle of data. The program fetches all of the sources above itself, in parallel, and hands back a single answer. Nothing above is contacted by your browser, so there are no API keys in the page and nothing to leak.
If a source is down, the rest still render. Each feed is allowed to fail on its own; the failure is listed at the bottom of the page as a feed note rather than taking the page with it.
It refreshes every 2 minutes, and again the moment you switch back to the tab, so a phone left in a pocket is current the second you look at it.
The map, the cone and the progression table load after the numbers, so the thing you need first arrives first.

Which numbers are ours, not NOAA's

Three figures on this page are calculated here, and it is worth knowing which:

Closest approach — we walk the NHC forecast track leg by leg and find the point nearest your coordinates, and when it happens. If the advisory track cannot be read, the page falls back to a straight line from the current heading and says so.
Distance and bearing — great-circle, from the advisory's own coordinates to yours.
Storm surge — the tide station's observed water level minus its predicted tide for the same moment. The difference is the water the storm added.

What it does not do

It is not an alerting system. It will not wake you. Keep NWS alerts on your phone.
FEMA flood zones only draw at street-level zoom — that is FEMA's limit, and the page tells you when you need to zoom in.
The progression table uses full advisories only, issued every 6 hours. NHC publishes no forecast advisory for intermediate numbers like 12A, so those do not appear.
Observation stations go quiet, especially military fields. The page walks the five nearest and uses the first that has reported in the last 3 hours, then shows you which one it used.
Tracking is Gulf‑focused by design: Atlantic systems in, near, or forecast to enter the Gulf. Everything else is in the collapsed panel above.

Privacy

No account, no cookie set by this page, no tracking of you. A ZIP you type is kept in your own browser so the page remembers it, and is sent to this site only to look up a forecast. Your coordinates are never stored anywhere. (Cloudflare, which serves the page, applies its own standard analytics.)

The rule that outranks this page

This is a convenience layer over official products, written quickly, during a storm. If the National Hurricane Center, the National Weather Service or your county emergency management say something different, they are right and this page is wrong. Act on them.