How Do You Follow Weather Reports As You Travel?

Over 30,000 people die in accidents every year on the road. 80 people a year on average from tornadoes. Kind of puts it in perspective. Over 290 people were killed from crime in Los Angeles in 2016.

Like others have stated thunderstorms are forcast a week in advance and easily avoided when traveling. I use AccuWeather.com. for weather.

We carry a weather radio, TV, smart phones, and a laptop. Ran into tornado's in mid TN a few years back when the Grand Ole Opry flooded. The radio was in constant alarm all night, tornadoes and such all around, no way could we figure out where they were headed trying to follow on the map. We really would have needed to have studied the paper map ahead of time to know where we were and the surrounding counties. We tended to try and ignore what's happening in the world when we were on vacation, didn't know there were severe storms coming till they were on top of us.

The only thing that worked was the camp host in the golf cart telling us when to head to the bathrooms.

Winter before last just outside Pensacola we encountered similar. No cell service on our carrier, TV and the map worked well. A fella at the bathrooms had a good radar app on his phone and had service so all could see what was happening.

Both of these times the weather radio alerted us to bad weather but was too confusing to pinpoint anything.

I use accuweather.com for the city we are in - then look ahead at the city we are going to. You can store 5 cities weather and then use the drop down box at the top to view each one as you progress. As you look up new ones, the old disappears. You can look at the current, weekend, extended, monthly forecasts.

WTP-GC wrote:

SCVJeff wrote:
There are any number of weather apps out there, but at the end of the day they all draw their forecasts and alerts from NWS.

That's not entirely correct, at least, not in my region. And I would suspect that my region is similar to others. With the emergence of personal weather stations, all the apps I've seen are able to retrieve data from those stations that are public access. For example, our local fire station has a weather station that puts out all current/active weather data plus alerts. Long term forecast might come from other sources, but certainly the NWS is not the provider of all data. If that were the case, then my WeatherBug app and weather channel app wouldn't always be in disagreement ;-)

But for the topic, I believe that people used to travel just fine long before the smartphone era. I think that with the abundance of technology we have at our fingertips these days, people have found more worriful things to consume themselves with.

Personal Weather Stations are all aggrated but Weather Underground and others draw off that data. These PWS stations (of which I have two) are not official notifications, nor do they have any relation to NWS radar or any of the others, although they are fun to look at.. Personally I prefer Intellicast/ Storm maps and predictions, but the simple fact is that NWS manages ALL EAS alerts across the country. If any of the apps wake up to an EAS Alert, it's NWS that forwarded it. THEY are the single agency that manages all things EAS

Did anyone buy the weather app from Garmin for the 660,760,770 etc? Curious to hear how that works.

There are so many sites to get weather from. They ALL get their info from the same place. NOAA. Get it direct from NOAA & you are getting it from the horse's mouth.

jnharley wrote:
How about a weather alert radio. They are easy to set up and with an atlas are essential for us. We set it up at each location. I go online and look up the SAME code and frequency and set up the radio. Then if there is an alert, if need be, we take a look at the atlas to see where the storm is in relation to us. One does not always have internet and cannot depend on cell based apps in all locations.

when we travel we don't use the SAME codes becuz I want to hear about weather warnings for adjacent counties as well as our own. that provides us with an earlier heads-up.

I like to get daily forecasts from a local area TV Station. Being aware that most weathermen/ women hilight the negative aspects of the forecast.

Usually the first notice of bad weather in my immediate area is the satellite TV quits working.

Most very important thing is to know where you are and have a paper map so you can see where the real bad weather is and track where they are predicting it will go.

I like Intellicasts web site, and use it. Doesn't really matter which app you use. Most like Accu-Weather, Intellicast, Weatherunderground are all owned by Weather.com/ Weather Channel and show the same information.

None of the online services make predictions. That comes from the NWS and only the NWS issues alerts.

I've been in one tornado situation while in my RV. That was Dallas/ Garland on Dec 26, 2015. I used to live in that area, and I watched WFAA TV live on my phone.

Nothing beats a local TV Station for street by street / block by block tracking of a tornado. It also helped greatly that I knew the area and could follow the tornado without having to look at a map. It passed less than a mile east of us. Was night so didn't see it for certain, might have caught a glimpse.

Do not trust your RV to protect you in a tornado. Get inside a solid walled shelter or building.

How about a weather alert radio. They are easy to set up and with an atlas are essential for us. We set it up at each location. I go online and look up the SAME code and frequency and set up the radio. Then if there is an alert, if need be, we take a look at the atlas to see where the storm is in relation to us. One does not always have internet and cannot depend on cell based apps in all locations.

Don't need much more than this.

Another good basic IR Satelite site without all the fluff.

The weather radio, on the marine frequencies, is good too but it takes some doing to make sense of if you are not familiar with the countys you are passing through.