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The Platform

Broadcast-grade severe weather, end to end.

Vortex Viewer is a PyQt6 + WebGL2 workstation that stitches NEXRAD radar, NWP models, severe weather intelligence, AI narration, and broadcast graphics into a single operator interface.

Live Radar

Every WSR-88D station, GPU-rendered.

Vortex Viewer pulls anonymous Level II and Level III data straight from AWS S3 and renders raw polar bins on a WebGL2 GPU-instanced pipeline — no PNG rasterization, no quality loss.

  • 155 WSR-88D NEXRAD stations with lat/lon database
  • Live refresh on configurable timer with rotating beam trail
  • VCP-accurate sweep rotation at broadcast-TV RPM
  • Dark Fusion palette with custom QSS styling
  • 11-band NWS reflectivity color ramp
NEXRAD radar rendering
Volumetric 3D storm rendering

VortexView 3D

Ray-marched cumulonimbus. Real physics. Real detail.

VortexView 3D is a from-scratch WebGL2 volumetric renderer that turns reflectivity data into billowing, self-shadowed storm clouds — complete with wall clouds, tornado funnels, and precipitation shafts.

  • Multi-scale simplex noise for large billows through micro detail
  • Directional lighting with self-shadowing & ground shadow projection
  • SDF wall clouds merged into storm body at mesocyclone locations
  • SDF tornado funnels tapered wall-cloud to ground
  • Rain/hail shafts with dBZ-driven density (hail > 55 dBZ)
  • 3D lightning bolts with jagged branching and flash decay

Vortex AI

A radar-college-student AI, on the air with you.

Powered by the Claude API and a meteorology-aware system prompt, Vortex AI captures your radar scene, interprets the data, focuses the map on the storm it's discussing, and speaks it in a natural broadcast voice.

  • Claude-driven storm analysis & chat input
  • Gemini TTS primary voice engine (Edge TTS fallback)
  • Threat level display: Monitoring / Watch / Advisory / Warning / Extreme
  • Voice ducking — background music drops during narration
  • Mute Voice / Mute Music separate controls
  • Triple-beep 880 Hz warning tone before new alerts
  • Low-level rotation filter (mesocyclone base ≤ 6,000 ft AGL)
  • Seamless 3-second background-music crossfade loop
Vortex AI analyzing a tornado-warned storm

Severe Weather Intelligence

Level-3 products, parsed and painted in real time.

SCIT

Storm Cell Identification & Tracking with dBZ, VIL, MESH, POH, POSH, TVS, MESO attributes. Storm motion projection lines, past tracks, forecast tracks, arrowhead tips, Baron-style click popups.

MDA

Mesocyclone Detection Algorithm. PNG spinning ring markers — red for low-level, yellow for elevated — with zoom-adaptive sizing and click-to-open shear info panels.

TVS

Tornado Vortex Signature rendered as a WebGL ring overlay with rotation strength data surfaced in the popup panel.

NHI

Hail Index with probable / positive hail triangle markers plus MESH labels for instant severity scanning.

NWS Alerts

Live Tornado, Severe Thunderstorm, Flash Flood, and Flood warnings with color-coded polygons, click popups, expiry timers, and a sortable alerts list.

Lightning & LSR

Real-time strike markers with age-based opacity on a native Mapbox GL symbol layer. LSR pings for tornado, hail, wind, and flood reports with magnitude & remark popups.

NWP Model Overlays

49 HRRR products. SPC outlooks. Live watches.

Vortex Viewer taps the UCAR THREDDS WMS feed for 49 HRRR products with a forecast-hour scrubber and fade-transition tiles. SPC Day 1 categorical outlooks (plus tornado / wind / hail) and active watch boxes overlay on demand.

  • Model toolbar with product selector + forecast-hour scrubber
  • Tornado Watch & Severe Thunderstorm Watch boxes
  • Oklahoma & Texas Mesonet station data
  • Fronts, surface obs, and radar mosaics
HRRR model overlay with storm cells

TPI Engine

The Tornado Potential Index.

A three-layer composite that fuses environment, radar signatures, and gate-to-gate shear into a single 0–100 score per storm.

Model TPI

CAPE, CIN, SRH, bulk shear, and LCL heights pulled from RAP and HRRR via THREDDS.

Radar TPI

Per-storm weighted composite of TVS, MESO, dBZ, VIL, and hail index signatures.

Enhanced + Composite

Gate-to-gate shear integration fused with Model TPI for a live 0–100 threat score. 13 km color-ramped grid overlay.

Broadcast Graphics

The details that make it feel on-air.

Popup Panels

Bevel-and-emboss dark-blue panels with connector lines to map features. Draggable Storm / Shear / Warning / Hail / LSR / Spotter cards with automatic collision avoidance.

GIS Overlay

7-tier population-driven city labels with drop shadows, halos, tier-specific fonts, letter spacing, and zoom visibility curves. County, state, and country lines with live-preview setup.

Scan Timestamp

Draggable QPainter QLabel overlay rendered at 2× resolution. Bottom-left by default, position persisted in QSettings, reused for loop playback.

Spotter Network

Live storm-spotter position markers with info popups — know where trained eyes already are.

Power Outage Layer

County-level outage fill polygons with click-through counts for post-storm impact assessment.

Warning Alert Tone

Programmatically generated 880 Hz triple-beep WAV via QSoundEffect, played before AI narrates a new warning.

Tech Stack

Python 3.12 · PyQt6 · Mapbox GL JS · WebGL2 · AWS S3 · UCAR THREDDS · Anthropic Claude · Edge & Gemini TTS · PyInstaller

Ready to see every pixel of the storm?

Vortex Viewer ships today. Start free, upgrade when you need the pro products.

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