RADAR IN YOUR CAR: CARPLAY Spotter Tools Pro is now a CarPlay navigation app. • Live radar on your car's screen, with warning polygons, storm cells, storm reports and radar sites • Layers: Reflectivity, Velocity, Storm-relative velocity, Correlation coefficient or the National composite, plus warnings on or off and a dark or light map • Sites: follow the nearest radar automatically or pick one • Search a town, ZIP code or address, or pick a recent place or a storm nearby, then Go for turn-by-turn on CarPlay's own turn cards • A trip started on your iPhone shows up in the car, and End in the car ends it on both • Car alerts on the CarPlay screen, and simpler maps for the Dashboard and instrument cluster SPOKEN TURNS WITH YOUR PHONE LOCKED Directions now keep talking when your iPhone is locked or another app is in front. LIVE CHASER POSITIONS • A new map layer shows featured storm chasers who are streaming on YouTube right now and sharing their position on Spotter Network • Tap a marker to watch their live stream • Live chasers stay on the map for as long as Spotter Network lists them • Team channels show a marker for each member out chasing • Partner chasers get a gold-ringed marker with their photo: Jim McGonigle, New Mexico Storm Chasing and South Central Mississippi Storm Chasers SHARE BUTTON • A new Share button in the bottom bar captures the screen you are on, map included, with a footer showing the logo, spottertools.pro and the date and time DUAL VIEW • Every Level II product in both panes, including storm-relative velocity, spectrum width and normalized rotation • Two panes on one radar share each download, so side by side costs no more data • Search, Center on me, a radar site pick or an alert now move both panes • Dual view loops use no more memory than single view TROPICAL • Each named storm's position is a spinning storm symbol with its category in the eye, faster as it strengthens • Fixed a storm card time that was 3 hours early and a distance that could be 45 miles off • New advisories show within about 5 minutes, and typhoons get their real category BUOY DATA EXPORT • Export data on a NOAA buoy's camera card shares its last 5 days of reports as a spreadsheet file NATIONAL RADAR • Low + Mid rotation: both rotation levels on one map, striped where both are spinning • Smooth colour scales for rotation, hail size, echo tops, VIL, rain totals and precip rate, with a quiet grey wash for weak values • Reflectivity layers in the national product list now use your own colour table and gate filter RADAR FIXES • Archived Level 2 velocity loops no longer skip 30 to 60 minutes when the radar keeps changing its settings • One failed scan no longer ends a Level 2 loop early and drops every newer frame

Turn By turn Nav

YOUR SETTINGS, ON EVERY DEVICE Sign in to your free Spotter Tools Pro account and your setup follows you to every iPhone, iPad, Android device and PC you use. • Map style and theme, layers and their options, radar settings, colour palettes (including imported .pal files), favorite radars, alert zones, your map marker and home location all sync • Choose what syncs on each device: untick any of six groups to keep it local • Icon sizes sync between devices of the same kind, so a phone and a PC can each look right • Changes from other devices arrive when you open or return to the app, or right away with Sync now, never mid-use • Passwords, your beacon, location sharing and Chaser Mode always stay on the device • Turn sync off on any device, or delete the saved copy from your account A CLEANER NATIONAL RADAR • The national radar now opens on quality controlled reflectivity, with birds, insects and ground clutter removed. Those returns look just like light rain, so no filter could clear them • Prefer the original? Pick Base Reflectivity and the app remembers it. Loops of 3, 6 and 12 hours are offered on the original PRECIP TYPE FOR THE NATIONAL RADAR • The whole national mosaic coloured as rain, snow, sleet or freezing rain, from the HRRR model every 15 minutes • Built on the clean radar, so birds are never painted as light snow • The inspector reads the type at any spot. Covers the lower 48 states TROPICAL • Model tracks, cones and paths for storms crossing the 180 degree line no longer draw around the whole globe • Spaghetti plots show every model's newest run from the last 12 hours, not just one cycle • Tracks update more often, and the last good tracks stay up if an update fails FIXES • Single site Precip Type is for live radar only, and steps aside for Reflectivity in archive mode, where it used to paint grey • Smoother panning with an MRMS product on the national radar • Searching Settings for "sync" finds the sync controls

One of our biggest updates yet. Four new tools, and a lot of polish. TORNADO ID (EXPERIMENTAL) A new option for single site radar that marks circulations with the chance a tornado is on the ground right now. • Built from years of Level 2 radar and confirmed tornado reports, and tested on a full year of storms it never saw • Tap a marker for its score, whether it is rising or falling, how long it has been tracked and whether a debris signature is showing • Works on live radar and in archive mode, where your device scores the scan itself • Off by default. Open Map layers, tap Single Site Radar and switch on Tornado ID • It is an estimate. Always follow official warnings EXPERT MODE Radar holes are real. One radar may be looking at the top of a storm while a neighbouring radar sees much lower over the same ground. • Turn on Expert on the radar panel, then tap up to two more radar sites on the map • Each radar paints only the ground it is closest to, so there is no double counting and the picture stays true single site data • All radars line up to the same moment, and a radar that is down is left out • Numbered badges show which radars are in the image PRECIP TYPE A new single site product that colors the radar as rain, snow, sleet or freezing rain. • Intensity comes from the radar, the type comes from the HRRR model, updated every 15 minutes • The inspector reads the type at any spot • Works in loops, with each frame colored from its own time MORE OUTLOOKS THAN EVER • Winter Weather: chance of 4, 8 and 12 inches of snow and a quarter inch of ice, Days 1 to 3 • WPC Hazards Days 3 to 7 and CPC Hazards Days 8 to 14, including heat, drought and flooding • Fire Weather out to Day 8 • Rainfall for Days 4 to 7 and in 6 hour periods • Winter Storm Severity parts: snow amount, snow load, ice and blowing snow • Monthly and seasonal temperature, precipitation and drought outlooks • Outlooks now load from our own fast servers, with NOAA as a backup RADAR IMPROVEMENTS • Level 2 velocity is cleaner, with far fewer folded patches that look like fake couplets • The Reflectivity filter now also cleans up the national radar mosaic • Velocity loops no longer get stuck on one frame on days when the radar changes scan modes • Archive loops now wait on the first frame until you press Play, and returning to live closes the loop • Archive radar no longer shows the wrong day after a network hiccup ALSO NEW • Live Cameras filter: show All, Live video or Stills only, with a count of what is on the map • Hurricane Hunter flights export as a two page picture brief or as data files • Soundings open on the hour closest to now instead of hours ago • The Tropical options sheet scrolls, so the storm list is always reachable • Map layer lists are back in alphabetical order

RADAR STARTS FASTER This release is mostly about the app getting out of its own way. • Archive loops build about a third faster and start playing sooner • A loop frame downloads only the part of the file it needs, and unpacks only the tilt it paints, instead of the whole scan • Six core phones get a second decode worker rather than grinding through a loop on one • Phones with memory to spare keep more of the loop. The budget used to be one flat number, so a large phone would thin a two hour loop down to thirteen frames with gigabytes going spare • Opening a site paints the real radar sooner. The first image was often a Level III picture up to a minute older than the Level 2 data already waiting STORMS IN 3D, BUILT FOR YOU The 3D storm volume arrived last release and your device had to build it. Now our servers build it and send it down ready to draw. • It appears almost immediately rather than after a full local scan. If no prepared volume is available for your site, the app quietly builds it locally as before • Your radar site and the national mosaic have their own opacity sliders, so you can keep the mosaic sheer for context and your own radar solid • Less banding inside the volume, so a storm reads as a solid body rather than a stack of shells • Debris and rotation still need the local scan, so on a fresh site the storm can appear before its highlights SPC OUTLOOK ALERTS ARE ABOUT YOU Outlook notifications were firing on the highest risk anywhere in the country, so a moderate risk in Nebraska sent a Tennessee user a banner quoting Nebraska's numbers, and tapping it showed no outlook on the map. • Outlooks are now matched against your own watch zones, and the alert describes the risk over each of them • Tapping one turns the outlook layer on and flies you to the strongest zone • A nationwide watch zone no longer means the whole country for outlooks. Warnings are unchanged, and there is a setting if you want the old behaviour • Outlooks that already expired no longer arrive after a background restart THE MAP TURNS WHEN YOU MEAN IT Two finger twist arrived last release and fired too easily, so a pinch with a wobble in it left the map slightly turned. • A turn now takes a deliberate twist, and nothing jumps when it engages • Lifting one finger can no longer turn a zoom into a rotation • There is a lock button if you would rather it never turned. The detent at north is unchanged and Chaser Mode still locks north up FORECAST • Every period carries its date, on the rail cards and in the list • Wind is on the cards, with a rising or falling temperature arrow when the office flags one • Rain chance is always drawn, so a dry day between wet ones reads as 0% • The hourly strip labels the day at the start and at every midnight FIXES • The map could freeze with cameras on. Drawing thousands of cameras shared a thread with the interface; it now happens off to the side and pauses in the background • Four sliders could paint a red error panel over the settings section they were in • Radar could stick after switching products with two views open, or leave a worker running after you left the screen • A first launch with no location permission and no home set opened on the middle of the ocean, and now opens on the country

STORMS IN 3D Radar has always been a flat slice. Now you can stand the whole scan up as a solid and fly around it, so you can see how a storm is built rather than inferring it one tilt at a time. Two ways in, following the layer you are on: • Your radar site's own volume, every tilt of a Level 2 scan resampled into one block, for a single storm in full detail • The nationwide mosaic, which works anywhere in the lower 48 at about a two minute cadence, so you are not tied to one radar's umbrella What you can see in it: • Debris and rotation are marked inside the storm. Debris shows where the radar sees something that is not rain, and rotation shows as a column through the storm rather than a couplet you have to hunt for on one tilt • Cores show through the envelope. Opacity follows rain rate, so heavy cores stay solid while light rain goes sheer and you can see into a storm from any side • Height is yours to set, including true scale • It plays. The volume runs with the loop, so you can watch a storm build and collapse in three dimensions The 3D chip appears when your device can render it, so it will not be on every phone. It always starts off when you open the app, on purpose, so you never get a pitched 3D map and a heavy load you did not ask for. It renders at whatever resolution keeps your device smooth, dropping detail before it drops frames. THE MAP TURNS Turning the map used to be Chaser Mode only. Now twist with two fingers anywhere to turn it; tilt is still the two finger vertical drag it always was. There is a detent at north. Come back within a few degrees and the map snaps to exactly north and stays there, so a twist that was really a pinch cannot leave you sitting three degrees off. Turning away takes a deliberate push, and the turn you put in while it was held is paid back in one motion rather than thrown away. Chaser Mode still locks north up, because it re-centres on every fix and a turnable map there would fight you the whole drive. LIGHTER ON MEMORY The satellite layer was the heaviest thing in the app, and four separate places were holding full resolution imagery with nothing on screen to show it. All four now let go. If you run satellite alongside radar the app has far more headroom than it did. FIXES • The 3D chips no longer come back on by themselves. They shared saved settings with the shape controls, so a session that ended in 3D handed the next launch a pitched 3D map at cold start. Height and floor choices are still remembered • Turning on 3D from a Level III product now switches you to the Level 2 twin of what you were looking at, since a volume needs the full scan • Exported loops carry the 3D volume, so what you share is what you saw • On iPad, the mosaic volume repainted slowly and now keeps up

Crash fix improvements.

INSTANT LEVEL 2 RADAR, NOW FOR SIX PRODUCTS Pre-decoded Level 2 frames arrive ready to draw instead of being decoded on your device. That used to cover reflectivity and velocity. It now covers six: • Reflectivity and velocity, as before • Correlation coefficient, the debris signature product • Spectrum width • Storm relative velocity and normalized rotation, both derived from the same velocity frame, so they arrive with it Switching products is fast now, not just switching sites. Going from Level III reflectivity to Level 2 velocity used to take about six seconds, because the old path structurally lacks the velocity half for most of a scan cycle and simply waited. That switch now races the fast lane. This covers the live lowest tilt. Higher tilts, every other product and the entire archive are unchanged. The fast path is an accelerator, not a requirement. Your device can still decode all of it on its own, and does exactly that whenever our radar service is busy or unreachable, with no error and nothing missing. It can only ever make things quicker, never leave you worse off. NORMALIZED ROTATION ACTUALLY WORKS It never drew anything. The completeness check asked each radar scan whether it carried a rotation measurement, which no scan does, because rotation is computed from velocity after the fact. So it waited forever for something that was never coming. If you tried it before and concluded it was unfinished, it was not. A CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE THAT DREW NOTHING Hurricane Lowell sat south of Hawaii as a Category 4 with no track, no cone and no wind field. Storms that cross 140 West get refiled by the National Hurricane Center into its Central Pacific list while keeping the basin code they were born with. Our hurricane centre feed skipped that list because the worldwide feed was supposed to own it, and the worldwide feed dropped him because he still read as an East Pacific storm. Each half deferred to the other. Fixed, along with storms being dropped when the summary list was briefly unreachable, and some storms being drawn twice. Recon flights in the East Pacific were missing too. Bulletins from that basin use a header the parser did not recognise, so those flights showed centre fixes from the eye but no flight track. Every East Pacific mission now parses. EXPORTED LOOPS LOOK MUCH BETTER The video quality formula was tuned against a tall phone screen, so wide frames computed below the minimum and went out at the lowest rate the encoder allows. Radar gate edges and palette boundaries break up badly at that rate. • Roughly three times the bitrate at the same size setting • A new XL size at 1440 pixels, since a desktop canvas is three to four times wider than the old ceiling. Your saved size preference is not disturbed MORE SATELLITE COVERAGE IN THE PACIFIC The central Pacific region now reaches 30 North, so a recurving hurricane no longer crosses an uncovered strip. The northwest Pacific region is wider, keeping the East China Sea approach and recurvature past Japan in frame. New Japan and Philippines landfall sectors. Region bounds are now server driven, so future coverage changes reach you without an update.

HURRICANE HUNTERS, LIVE ON THE MAP A new Aviation layer carrying live NOAA and Air Force reconnaissance: flight level observations along the track, and the vortex centre fixes the crews send back from the eye. • Tap any flight for the aircraft, the mission, and what it is measuring, with a live badge telling you whether it is still reporting • A Recon Graphs screen plots surface wind against flight level wind with the tropical storm and hurricane force bands marked, then pressure. The centre fix tab charts inbound against outbound maxima, minimum pressure, eye temperature and standard level height • A missing bulletin leaves a hole in the trace rather than a straight line pretending the data was there • It is its own layer rather than part of Tropical, because about half of all recon flights are surveillance or training with no storm involved STORM REPORTS, FROM A MUCH BETTER SOURCE NWS Local Storm Reports replace the old SPC digest, which was a once a day file covering only tornado, hail and damaging wind. • Minutes fresh instead of hours • About 27 report types across 19 categories, with seven filter chips • Report times now show in your local clock instead of UTC, in the sheet and in notifications • Reports stay for 4 hours by default, up from 1. If you already chose a window, yours is kept • The icon size and retention settings moved into the Storm Reports sheet, and the whole icon set was redrawn WIND FLOW, WITH ACTUAL CONTROLS Density, size, speed and opacity sliders. Wind also now draws on top of everything, which was requested; the trade is that particles draw over labels, warning outlines and icons too. ALERT POLYGONS ARE SHADED AGAIN Warnings and watches fill at 25 percent and outlooks at 60. This works now because fills paint under the radar and outlines paint over it, so the fill tints the echoes instead of washing them out. Mesoscale discussions stay unfilled on purpose. Your own opacity choices are untouched. CAMERAS New marker art with a pointer tail showing which way each camera faces, smaller translucent cluster bubbles, one size slider for both, and a new switch to stop grouping nearby cameras so dense cities show individual ones. NATIONAL RADAR Its own sub sheet with a continuous Smoothness slider and its own Opacity, split from the single site value. Low smoothness now shows the real grid instead of falling back to blurry tiles, and loop frames are cached so replays land instantly. FIXES • Level 2 radar could stop loading entirely while Level III kept working, with a force quit the only cure. A decompression helper could wedge with nothing watching it. Helpers are now watched and replaced, and these failures are counted so it cannot go unnoticed again • Echo Tops loops always failed to load • Tropical shading washed out the radar underneath it • Deep loops play more smoothly

SET A HOME LOCATION Reported by a user on Starlink whose app kept opening over Texas. A computer has no GPS, so it falls back to locating you by your internet connection, and Starlink, a VPN or cellular broadband can put that hundreds of miles away. Now you can just tell it where you live. • Four ways in: long press the map, the map actions menu, any city search result, or Settings • Home is the opening camera and nothing else. The recentre button, your own marker, Chaser Mode, the beacon and presence all still use your live position, because where you are right now stays a live question • Nothing expires it and nothing recalculates it ALERTS CAN WATCH YOUR HOME The same problem was quietly worse in alerts, where a wrong position meant a 50 mile alert circle around the wrong state while you believed you were covered. • A separate Home watch zone that follows your home setting rather than copying it • "My current location" now always states the coordinates your device is reporting, so a wrong one is obvious at a glance • Forecast for home joins Forecast for my location, once a home is set • The add zone sheet no longer clips its last option THE LEVEL III ARCHIVE REACHES THE 1990s The floor moves from March 2022 back to May 1992. • Moore 2013 and El Reno 2013 were both below a line the app could not cross, because the archives change compression format in August 2013. They load now • Bridge Creek and Moore, 3 May 1999, loads through the ordinary radar path with a real velocity couplet • Everything from 2020 on was already there, hidden by a measurement mistake Two honest caveats: reaching 1992 does not mean the radar network reaches 1992, since the rollout ran through the decade and most sites have no archive that far back. And before about 2010 the products carry sixteen colour levels rather than 256. TWO ARCHIVE FIXES • Evening loops were stopping dead. An anchor at 6:27 PM local is already past midnight in UTC, and the archive is filed by UTC day, so one test case gave three frames while 97 scans sat just behind it. The same anchor now returns 96 • A radar that recorded nothing says so, instead of accepting the date and showing an empty map FAVORITE RADAR SITES • Star up to twelve. Favorites sort just under your loaded site, so wide zoom stops dropping your home radar's label • A searchable picker over every site, needing no connection to a map service • A locate puck that takes you to your area and re-selects the nearest online radar, because a camera move alone leaves you looking at your own town through a radar 900 miles away A SMOOTHNESS SLIDER Settings, Radar Overlay. At 0 you get today's raw gates; at 1 they blend and echo edges feather. Default is 0, so nothing changes unless you go looking. Velocity is averaged as speed before it is coloured, so opposing gates become near-zero grey rather than mud. At full smoothing peak values soften, so keep it low if you are reading peaks.

VELOCITY, REBUILT Doppler velocity wraps around when a storm moves faster than the radar can measure in one look, and undoing that is the difference between a couplet you can trust and a field of green and red confetti. • A new solver that works outward from the strongest boundaries in the field, replacing the previous approach entirely. Scored against the National Weather Service's own dealiased product across a battery of real storms, including Hurricane Milton's eyewall and the Enderlin derecho, it is equal or better on every one. • Hurricanes and landfall cases in particular. Wrapping used to ratchet into progressively worse guesses across a loop. • True extremes are visible again. A genuine 105 mph inbound used to paint as a near-invisible navy hole, because the standard palette runs into a dark trough past about 90 knots and raw Level II reaches out there. Velocity now saturates the way the Level III product does. • The dark spokes radiating from the radar site on split-cut tilts are gone. • Velocity loops load far faster: one case went from over thirteen minutes cold to under two. THE ARCHIVE REACHES THE EARLY 1990s Level II now decodes the message 1 era, moving the floor from 2009 back to June 1991. The number flatters it, so worth knowing: 1991 is three radars and a partial day. Eight sites in 1992, nineteen by 1994, seventy-five by 1995, and continuous coverage from about 1996. Looking at a specific 1990s event works; deep loops of one really work from 1996 forward. The legacy era carries reflectivity, velocity and spectrum width, with no dual-pol and about a sixteenth of the area resolution of a modern scan. THREE HOUR LEVEL II LOOPS Up from about fifty minutes, on both live and archived radar, with 5, 7, 10, 18, 24 and 36 frame options. A busy Level II frame is close to 15 MB once it is ready to draw, so a three hour request used to come back thinned to eleven frames. Frames are now held compactly and expanded only when shown: the same request returns all 36 and holds 43 MB instead of half a gigabyte. Short loops went from about 100 MB to 12 MB. PLAYBACK IS SMOOTH AGAIN Frames used to be held on screen in proportion to the real gap before them, which falls apart the moment a radar runs a SAILS rescan: those arrive in pairs 24 seconds apart followed by a two minute gap, so the loop alternated between 80 ms and 340 ms per frame. Every frame now gets the same dwell. Loops also stopped churning memory while expanding frames, which was the other half of the unevenness. THE DOWNLOAD IS QUOTED BEFORE YOU TAP IT The live loop length menu now shows what a large request will cost, which matters most on cellular mid chase. CAMERAS Alabama gains 22 live cameras including WIAT's weather network, after being close to a live camera desert. The Windy webcams source has been removed; if you had it switched on, that toggle is gone.

RADAR TIME MACHINE The map now has a second clock. Pick a date and a time and the radar loop loads as it was at that instant, with storm tracks and mesocyclone markers along for the ride. • Level III reaches March 2022 and keeps its full loop ladder. Level II reaches 2017 on a shorter one, and the picker tells you the download size before you spend it. • Archive is a mode, not a layer. One clock governs every feed that has history, and layers with none switch off rather than sitting on live data under a past tense banner. • Pick the time zone you are thinking in. Local, UTC, Eastern, Central, Mountain, Arizona, Pacific, Alaska and Hawaii, with a same moment line cross referencing UTC so a lookup that rolled past midnight is obvious. • Everything that reads a value follows the clock, including storm relative velocity, the cross section and the wind profile. SHARE ANY LOOP AS A GIF OR MP4 Record what is on screen and hand it to the share sheet. Single site radar, the national composite, satellite, weather models and air quality. Pick a size, see the estimated file size first, and every frame carries a stamp so the loop still says what it is once it has left the app. LONGER RADAR LOOPS Level III loops now reach about eight hours. Frames are kept compact and expanded only when shown, so a deep loop fits in memory, loads faster and plays smoothly. OFFLINE MAPS Download a basemap area ahead of time and roads, town names and your GPS position keep working with no signal. Settings, Base Map, Offline Maps. A PROPER VISUAL PASS • Bundled typefaces, so the app looks the same on every platform and every number lines up in a column • Colour over the map is now reserved for data. Chrome that encodes no value is drawn neutral, which stops a blue chip sitting on a blue radar return. Sheets and settings keep every theme's identity • The bottom of the map got its space back: shorter home row, tighter legends, and the scale bar finally sits above the chrome instead of floating • You can hide the bottom bar on the Map tab and hand its height back to the map • Fresh installs now open in Midnight Black on the Blue Nav basemap. If you have ever picked a theme or basemap, nothing changes for you WEATHER MODELS Ten products were painting colour with no scale beside them, including 1 km reflectivity and updraft helicity on the flagship CONUS models. All ten now have a legend that matches the pixels. Several products also stopped resampling blocky at high zoom. SOUNDINGS GFS joins the model picker, which covers Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and offshore where HRRR has no data. ALSO Basemaps can now be added or updated without an app release, the announcement card stopped throwing layout errors on launch, and there is a new premium avatar.

STORM TRACK, REBUILT The old tool wanted two waypoints and fanned a cone off a single point, so a sixty-mile squall line collapsed into a dot. The new one is built around the storm's leading edge. • Draw the edge and finish — that is the whole interaction. The motion comes off the radar, averaged across every tracked cell within forty miles of what you drew, so one decaying cell out front can't drag the projection sideways. • Every town in the path with its arrival time, from a 49,794-place gazetteer built into the app. Towns no longer drop off when you zoom out, and the population floor is fifty, so the villages of a few hundred get named. • Your own arrival is called out first, above the town list. • Cell mode for a single supercell, with its own size control. • Hand the track over as a sentence you can read out on a net: motion, your arrival, then the places, in clock times. • Arrival times count from the radar frame you drew on, not the wall clock — pricing them off the storm-tracking product made every town land early by up to nine minutes. • The swath stays rigid for thirty minutes and then flares, instead of pretending a hard edge is still true at seventy-five. DRAW ON MAP, REBUILT Marks were anchored to the screen, so circling a hook echo and panning half a county left the circle over farmland. Every shape now stores real coordinates and stays put through pan, zoom, rotate and tilt. • Freehand, line, arrow, box and circle, with a contrast halo so a stroke stays readable across a 65 dBZ core • Select and edit anything: move, drag vertices, resize, text labels, dash, opacity, fill, stacking order, duplicate, delete • Snap-and-straighten turns a scribble into a clean line or ellipse — useful when drawing in a moving vehicle • Eleven presets: warm, cold, stationary and occluded fronts with correct pips, outflow, dryline, rotation, hail core, damage corridor, target box, escape route • Every shape reports its own measurements: length and bearing, radius, dimensions, area, corridor width • Autosave, a named library, and PNG or GeoJSON export • Hand a drawn vector to Storm Track — a line becomes the edge, an arrow becomes the motion • Fifty levels of undo and redo • A tool picker that says what each tool and preset does WEATHER MODELS • The picker is now a sectioned sheet — CONUS, Global, Ensembles, Tropical, Europe, Asia, Marine, Air Quality — served from the backend, so new models appear without an app update • ICON-D2 added for Europe • Support for 15-minute models NATIONAL RADAR • The crosshair now reads values off live national reflectivity, and stays honest during playback — the reading matches the frame on screen • The legend shows a real clock time and a live age that keeps counting, instead of the hour a frame runs through • Frames can no longer be served stale from the cache LIGHTNING Bolt-to-map latency drops from about two minutes to roughly 45-70 seconds, and a caching fix stops the feed being pinned hours behind. CAMERAS Colorado is back — the state's transport department retired the API the app used and the whole state quietly emptied out. It now reads their new one: 1,016 cameras, about 805 live video, compass chips intact. A camera source whose agency changes its API can now be repaired from the server rather than needing an update. FIXES • Two crashes where the app kept working with a screen that had already closed • Storm cell markers no longer draw more places than the map can label • New model runs are picked up without restarting the app

NEW: EARTHQUAKES LAYER Worldwide USGS coverage. Magnitude printed inside every dot, a pickable magnitude floor and time window, and a tap card with depth, timing, distance from you, felt reports, PAGER level, tsunami zone and review status. Optional felt-range overlays — a dashed ring is our estimate, a solid contour is the real measured ShakeMap. NEW: WILDFIRES LAYER Active NIFC incidents with optional burn perimeters and NASA FIRMS satellite hotspots. Tap a fire for acreage, containment, cause, behavior, crew size, complexity, managing team, fuel and cost to date, plus satellite activity: detections in the last 24 and 6 hours, peak radiative power and latest pass. Hotspot dots are tappable and sized by fire radiative power. AIR QUALITY, REBUILT • NOAA HMS smoke plumes, shaded under the AQI surface and radar • PM10 added to the pollutant picker, for dust and haboobs • AQI numbers on every visible dot at every zoom • An EPA category legend • A past-24-hours sparkline in the monitor sheet • Multi-day forecasts for the nearest AirNow reporting area, with Action Day badges • Dots paint instantly instead of taking 5-20 seconds NEW ALERT TYPES Earthquake, wildfire and air quality alerts join AlertWatch, each with its own settings and sound. All off by default. • Earthquakes alert on what you would actually feel rather than a fixed radius, with your own magnitude floor and an optional major-quakes-anywhere-in-the-US toggle • Wildfires alert on newly discovered fires near you and on rapid growth • Air quality alerts when the nearest monitor crosses the EPA category you choose Alert distances are now shown in miles everywhere. THREE NEW MAP STYLES Spotter Tools Grey, Midnight and Blue Nav. SHARPER LEVEL II VELOCITY Satellite-overlay noise is censored before unfolding instead of being mistaken for wind, and dense near-Nyquist wrap now folds properly. Velocity animations are re-solved frame by frame against the previous frame and the site's sounding, so loops no longer look worse than the live view. MESOSCALE DISCUSSIONS BY WATCH PROBABILITY Colored from grey-blue through blue, amber and orange to red at 80% and above, with the tier named in the info sheet. CAMERAS Camera feeds now update without an app release, and 92 dead streams found in an audit of all 368 curated cameras were repointed or retired. FIXES • Alert checks now run during background app refresh, so a closed app has a chance to notify you at whatever cadence iOS grants • Much lower memory and battery use when iOS wakes the app in the background • Radar imagery sat half a gate further out than every sampler thought, so the crosshair could read the neighboring value • Wind flow no longer hides under satellite imagery • Send yourself a test alert from notification settings, using your own sound profile and DND setting Now requires iOS 15.

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.57 This update covers everything since 1.0.54, so there is a lot here. THE FULL NWS FORECAST, ANYWHERE YOU TAP • Long-press the map, use the map menu, or search a city to pull the complete National Weather Service forecast for that exact spot. • Current conditions from the nearest airport station, an alert banner when something is active, and the day and night periods in the forecaster's own words. • A 48 hour trend chart over an hour-by-hour strip you can tap through. • The Area Forecast Discussion, so you can read the local office's reasoning without leaving the app. • Every grid layer that office publishes for your spot, including thunder probability, mixing height, transport wind, wet bulb globe temperature and the Haines index. Tap any value for a plain English explanation. • The last forecast stays readable when you lose signal. HOME SCREEN WIDGET • Put the forecast for any place on your home screen. Choose the location, show the next few hours or the next few days, and match it to the app's theme or pick your own. • An optional strip appears when a warning or watch covers that spot. • It refreshes on its own, and holds onto the last good reading if an update fails. • Requires iOS 17 or later. The app itself still runs on iOS 15. The widget offers My Location plus any place you have opened a forecast for, so pull up a forecast somewhere once to make it available. NEW FORECAST MODELS • AIFS 25km, the ECMWF AI Forecast System, 6 hourly out to 15 days. • GEFS Mean 50km, the ensemble average, 6 hourly out to 16 days. It is the mean of the whole ensemble rather than a single run, so read it as the middle of the road rather than a specific outcome. • Model products are now grouped into categories you can expand, instead of one long list. RADAR • Long loops load noticeably faster, and on newer phones frames decode in parallel. • Tapping a storm cell during playback now reads the frame you are looking at rather than the latest scan, and the readout moves above the crosshair when the loop bar is in the way. • Outlooks joined the quick layer switcher in the bottom corner. • Radar and model layers now paint on top of outlook shading instead of underneath, so your echoes stay visible when outlooks are on. • The two radars are now named for what they are, Single Site and National, rather than the feed behind them. • Panning during playback no longer stutters. FIXES • Model layers no longer show a stale run after the app sits in the background. • Warning notification map previews load faster and more reliably.

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.54 Sign in with your Spotter Network account - Just use your Spotter Network username and password. No more digging your App ID out of the Spotter Network dashboard and pasting it in. The old App ID method is still there if you prefer it. - Your own dot on the map is now matched exactly, so you always know which spotter is you. A cleaner map - Every layer used to pin its own row of buttons under the app bar, and they stacked. Turn on a few layers and a quarter of your screen was controls. Now they all share one compact rail that stays the same height no matter how many layers you run. - A new button in the bottom corner switches between the four layers that paint the map, single-site radar, composite, weather models, and satellite, in one tap. It wears the icon of whatever is currently on screen, so it doubles as a status light. More satellite, more places - The region picker now carries the full NESDIS sector list, 22 GOES-East regions and 12 GOES-West, in a two-level picker that is much easier to browse. - New West Pacific view covering the typhoon basin from Japan out into the open Pacific, using Himawari imagery. - Satellite frames with missing data are now skipped instead of showing gaps. Soundings - The plain-language read now tells you what happens to storms moving into the area, not just whether new storms can fire. A capped sounding no longer makes an incoming mature storm look doomed. - Scrub through hourly forecast profiles. - New dry microburst callout, and better handling of capped and high-shear low-CAPE setups. Fixes - Fixed leftover timers that could keep running after other spotters left the map. - More background and startup reliability work.

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.53 Critical Alerts are here - Apple approved Critical Alerts for Spotter Tools Pro. Tornado Emergencies, Particularly Dangerous Situation warnings, and Flash Flood Emergencies can now break through Do Not Disturb and the silent switch. If you already have Bypass Do Not Disturb turned on, it starts working automatically once you update. Alerts while you are using the app - Warnings now reach you while the app is open. Before, an alert outside your current map view could go unnoticed, and everything from your session arrived as one burst of notifications when you closed the app. - Alert updates now download a fraction of the data they used to, so the app runs smoother and lighter on your data plan. Crash fix for background users - Fixed a crash that could close the app while the GPS beacon or alert notifications were running in the background. It could strike at any time, even with the app in your pocket.

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.49 See storms in three dimensions - Radar cross sections: draw a line across a storm and get a vertical slice through it, so you can see the structure from the ground up instead of just the view from above - 3D radar tilt: pitch the map with two fingers and the radar beam rises with distance, the way the real beam does, so you can see how a storm stacks up in the sky - Full-volume radar decoding under the hood, so every tilt of the scan is available Satellite - Two new GeoColor regions: East Pacific Tropics and Central Pacific - Faster, smoother loop playback, with new 3x and 4x speeds - Fixed the freshness readout so it reports the imagery you are actually seeing Weather models - Model values now show as numbers anchored to city names right on the map - The live crosshair readout now includes a weather-model line - Model buttons are now labeled by resolution, and a new EHI 0 to 3 km product was added - Smoother model animation Everywhere else - 3x and 4x speeds on every animation player - Surface Fronts now has a sizing submenu so you can scale each element to taste - Radar sweep beams now animate at a consistent speed

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.48 - A redesigned loading screen gives the app a fresh first impression at launch - Improved startup reliability: the app now waits for a calm moment before starting its background services, so it opens more smoothly and dependably

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.47 Find any place fast - A new search box in the map menu lets you type any city, town, or place and fly straight to it, no more panning and pinching across the map Radar range rings - Rings are now labeled in miles so you can judge distance at a glance - Ring colors are customizable, and they adapt so they stay easy to see over any radar product FastScan sweep - The sweep beam now spins continuously for a live radar-scope feel - Pick your own beam colors - A behind-the-scenes speed boost makes Level 2 radar smoother Fixes and reliability - Search and pin panels no longer hide behind the Android navigation bar - The app starts up more reliably (a launch-time background-service timing issue is fixed) - Fixed a rare crash when closing an announcement video while it was still loading

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.46 Radar - New FastScan sweep: an optional beam-reveal sweep animation with range rings and live pipeline status chips (off by default, turn it on in settings) - New TVS (Tornado Vortex Signature) markers on the Level III storm-attributes overlay Lightning - Smoother strike reveals: the reveal clock now catches up in bounded steps instead of dumping strikes in batches Alerts and performance - The nationwide warning polygon pipeline is now split into class and band buckets and no longer deep-copied on every build, so warnings render faster and with less jank - Satellite frame and image caches are released under memory pressure to reduce low-memory issues Fixes - The long-press pan veto now survives main-thread stalls, so long-press handling stays reliable under heavy load

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.45 New long-press map menu Press and hold anywhere on the map for a quick context menu: pull a point sounding, list the nearest radars, inspect that spot, or find the nearest cameras In-app Contact & Feedback A new Contact & Feedback option in Settings lets you send feedback or reach out from inside the app Fixes and stability The estimated population count inside a warning polygon no longer hangs, and now yields in frame-safe slices Fixes for a dispose-time listener re-entry and a stale annotation handle

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.44 Satellite Per-region GeoColor: bounded regional boxes deliver crisper true-color imagery, both live and animated Fixes The tropical layer no longer blanks out on Android (some tropical systems carried null geometry that could clear the whole layer) Bottom-edge legends no longer overlap the composite radar play and transport bar

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.43 Radar Radar site pins now render as lettered status pills, color-coded for up, down, or loaded, and they declutter automatically as you zoom out Composite now picks up within-the-hour MRMS frame updates, so the latest data shows sooner, and skips redundant repaints when a refresh is identical Discussions WPC Mesoscale Precipitation Discussions (flooding MPDs) are now included in the Mesoscale Discussions layer Beacon New upload intervals: 7, 10, and 15 minutes, for finer control over battery versus update rate Fixes and stability Panning the map no longer opens a point sounding by accident Layer refresh timers re-arm after the app resumes, so live layers no longer freeze after backgrounding Memory and crash fixes from ongoing triage, plus a color-table (.pal) import fix

Spotter Tools Pro 1.0.42 New Outlooks layer A multi-product outlooks layer on the map: Convective outlooks, Day 1 through Day 8 Thunderstorm (general thunder) outlook Excessive Rainfall (ERO) and QPF Fire Weather outlook Winter Storm Severity (WSSI) CPC 6 to 10 day temperature and precipitation Drought Monitor Contours are smoothed so outlook edges read clean instead of stair-stepped. Satellite GOES-West added, so you can view East or West Radar-synced loop that tucks the clouds under the precipitation GPU cross-fade animation for smooth frame transitions Crisper, faster live view with lighter, quicker-loading loops Full-disk coverage and probe-anchored loops The freshness readout now names the specific satellite running behind Radar Models and radar are mutually exclusive again, so they no longer draw over each other The Live Chasers layer now restores automatically Announcements In-app announcement cards can now play video inline