I would suspect that no private 3rd party company would want the liability of issuing a severe warning - or choosing not to, after users have come to expect it. These things are better left to the NWS (I’m assuming we’re in the US here, considering we’re talking about tornado danger.)
Also, surface winds don’t usually have a lot to do with the path of a tornado. The Tempest doesn’t take upper air soundings . Even with a full suite of upper air data and supercomputers crunching the best models around, the NWS can’t really predict the exact path of an existing tornado. I wouldn’t want to see a 3rd party try.
I do like the idea of the app pulling NWS issued warnings and popping an alert that shows them. Nice to have the majority of your weather info in one place.
This tell me NWS. scientist need to be working on how to spot a tornado both in the day and night w/o actually using their eyeballs. What this has not been done is beyond me. This information need to come up as an alert and then a live real time path needs to be shown with the same accuracy as that used in google and apple maps. At least this would allow people to see where it is going to hit or has hit and get out of the way. IMHO, we are far behind in our capabilities.
Any thunderstorm is a wildly dynamic, living and breathing phenomenon. Supercell thunderstorms doubly so, because the mesocyclone (rotating updraft) affects every other cyclic variable of the storm. Then there’s surrounding environment variables.
Precisely and accurately modeling a house-by-house damage path, or even the exact length of the path (how long the tornado remains on the ground) are well beyond the limits of our current technology. The level of precision to which this can be done is shown by the shape of the warnings that are currently issued. You’ll notice that they are often shaped as a wedging-out polygon. This shows the area that could conceivably be impacted by the tornado, depending on how it moves. There are simply too many unpredictable variables that interact in unpredictable ways to be able to forecast it any more precisely than that. Naturally researchers are always working on tightening up forecast precision, but it’s a slow and iterative process. But don’t worry, I’m sure that eliminating half of NOAA will speed things up…
I’m just an airline pilot, man… But I do have a background in meteorology and I know several of these folks. Your statement is like saying someone can simply jump to the moon without any extra equipment if they’re “driven hard enough”. It’s nonsensical. I’m afraid you don’t understand what you don’t understand, here.
I had to work with NWS field staff a few years ago, tracing the path of an EF1 tornado that tore through where I worked and killed someone. They couldn’t even determine the tornado’s path or length of time on the ground from looking at the post-storm damage on a sunny day because of the way that the tornado skipped around, and the wind data from my now-former employer’s Davis PWS was essentially useless in a 3D wind situation with the funnel tracking less than 100 feet from the 2D anemometer/wind vane…
. Even with a full suite of upper air data and supercomputers crunching the best models around, the NWS can’t really predict the exact path of an existing tornado. I wouldn’t want to see a 3rd party try.