Press & About — VORTEX Storm Intelligence

Key facts

Why VORTEX exists

The single largest avoidable risk factor in US tornado fatalities is nocturnal tornadoes hitting people who are asleep. A 2008 peer-reviewed study by Ashley et al. in Weather and Forecasting documented that nighttime tornadoes are about 2.5 times more deadly than daytime tornadoes, primarily because of delayed warning reception. Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) help, but iPhone Focus modes, Android battery optimization, and edge-of-polygon coverage all create gaps. Most third-party weather apps send push notifications that Do Not Disturb silences.

VORTEX places an actual phone call — which bypasses Do Not Disturb on both major mobile platforms by default — when a National Weather Service warning is issued for a user's saved location. This is not a workaround; it's the only purpose-built mechanism in the US severe-weather tooling ecosystem that reliably wakes a sleeping user.

The product was started after a near-miss with a tornado at a campground near Rogers, Arkansas. Existing apps either silenced the alert overnight or arrived after the warning had already expired. The phone-call layer is the answer to that specific failure mode.

What's distinctive

Phone-call alerting via Twilio

VORTEX Pro uses Twilio's voice API to place calls from a dedicated alerting line when warnings fire. Calls are rate-limited per user and monitored for abuse patterns to prevent spam. The architectural choice trades call cost for a tier of reliability that push notifications can't match.

Public projection-accuracy dashboard

VORTEX publishes its tornado-track projection accuracy openly at vortexintel.app/accuracy — a live scoreboard computed from real NWS warnings over the trailing 90 days. Six headline statistics including median miss distance, persistence skill (the fraction of projections that beat the "leave the dot where it was" baseline), catastrophic miss rate, and 14-day trend. We don't know of any other severe-weather app that publishes this kind of self-evaluation publicly.

Daily fact-checked storm briefings

The VORTEX Storm Briefings publish daily at 13:00 UTC. Posts are generated against canonical SPC outlook data, validated by deterministic fact-checks, and require explicit citations from NOAA, NWS, or peer-reviewed literature. The pipeline includes a Tier 1 (deterministic) + Tier 2 (LLM-driven) repair stack for any factual errors caught at validation time.

Programmatic tornado-history hub

The /tornadoes hub serves 3,000+ city-level historical pages, each pre-computed nightly from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center archive. Each page covers 1950–present, with EF rating distribution, decade trends, peak month, deadliest event, casualty totals, and the 20-year recent activity trend. Top metros also have hand-curated narrative content covering named historical events.

FEMA disaster declarations integration

The /disasters hub serves FEMA disaster declarations live from the OpenFEMA API at three levels: national, state, and county. Each county page lists every Stafford Act declaration on record (1953–present) with the program flags (Individual Assistance, Public Assistance, Hazard Mitigation) that were active.

Data sources

All severe-weather data shown to users comes from public-domain federal feeds:

• National Weather Service — tornado warnings, flash flood warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings, polygon geometry
• Storm Prediction Center (NOAA) — Day 1/2/3 convective outlooks, mesoscale discussions, watches
• NEXRAD via Iowa State Mesonet — live US weather radar tiles. NEXRAD Level II/III data is public-domain federal data via NOAA; it isn't something VORTEX licenses, and it has no relationship to the Pro subscription price — Pro pays for VORTEX's processing, alerting, and call infrastructure, not the underlying radar data itself
• NASA GIBS — global precipitation (GPM IMERG), satellite imagery (GOES-East ABI)
• USGS — earthquake catalog
• NIFC — wildfire perimeters
• Open-Meteo — atmospheric parameters for risk scoring (CAPE, helicity, wind shear)
• OpenFEMA API — federal disaster declarations
• NOAA Storm Events — historical tornado archive (1950–present)

Technical stack (high level)

• Frontend: Vanilla JavaScript single-page app, no framework, no build step
• Map engine: MapLibre GL JS v4.7 with MapTiler Dataviz Dark tiles
• Hosting: Vercel for static + serverless API routes
• Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL + Edge Functions + Auth)
• Voice delivery: Twilio
• Push delivery: ntfy.sh (privacy-respecting open push service)
• Payments: Stripe
• Email: Resend
• Sentry for frontend error tracking; custom health probes for backend

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