How Our Tracker System Works

More accessible mobile internet and faster connections makes it possible for us to provide you live updates while we are on the road. A great deal of development has been done to get you the latest information on how our chase is going.

Live Pictures

We have an external cell antenna, cell amplifier, cell broadband modem, and a Cradlepoint CTR350 - basically the best and fastest mobile hot spot you can get in the most remote of area. We would like to provide live video, but we need all the bandwidth we can get for radar imagery and storm updates - for, you know, staying alive.

But fear not, we have an eye-fi equipped camera that can automatically upload pictures to the website in seconds. While you won't see a live video feed, you will see what we saw about one minute ago.

Text Updates & Map Plots

Text updates are provided manually through a backend form on this website. Location information is updated automatically through our GPS. Our speed is provided so you can tell if we are racing towards a storm or waiting for it to come to us.

Dynamic Update Intervals

As the informational message at the top of the tracker page states, it is not necessary to manually refresh the page to get the latest information - it is all automatically updated. You see a countdown timer that will countdown from a number between 20 and 600 seconds. When we are in calm weather heading towards our target area, we won't be providing new information every minute, so the refresh countdown timer will countdown from a larger number - up to 600 seconds (10 minutes). When we are in a storm, we can change the refresh frequency to as low as 20 seconds, so we can feed you more frequent information. All you have to do is leave the page open, and the update frequencies will change as needed.

When we are out storm chasing, view our tracking system.