I'm a person who orients myself mentally in relation to where I am on a map. I've driven most of the state, and good bits of other states when traveling. I don't do GPS, I'm a map person all the way.
I also love to follow weather. I love following the changing shapes and colors of weather radar maps, especially when I can watch movements of weather systems and work to figure out my personal chances of experiencing rain or snow at any given time. Where I live right now is a spot where radar is often wrong about where precipitation is falling, often claiming it's overhead when it's not. This happens to be the high spot of the county I'm in, which has the effect of parting weather systems so they pass to the side. We still get weather, but often watch it go around, no matter in which direction it's traveling.
Of course climate change is showing effects. The last couple years were pretty dry here, and now this spring is pretty wet, not in a bad way, at least not yet this spring, but nourishing the ground without damaging what sits on it.
Much of the country is not so lucky. There's more heat to our south, so more energy, resulting in record numbers of tornadoes the past few weeks. We're still cool enough here to avoid those, so far. Heat is coming, of course. We're not immune here. In a practical sense, it's a good thing we have so little severe summer weather. But from my personal point of view, I happen to love a good thunderstorm, with lots of lightning all around, or at least as long as I can watch it from shelter. I had a screen porch added to the west side of the house after it was built, not only to keep mosquitoes out, but to allow a view of storms rolling in... or mostly passing by.
I recently got introduced to a new kind of map online which is a great indicator of the severity of storms on this planet. Mine opens with our state in the center, probably because the internet knows where our wifi router is. The map can be persuaded to move to other areas, even crossing oceans. It shows lightning strikes in real time.
They start as a tiny red dot, expanding to a small circle with a yellow center. Then they sit on the map for a while, until overlaid by another strike or bunch of strikes. I don't know how long it takes for them to go away, but since they stick around you can get a really good idea of how widespread the storm is. The change in shape/color draws the eye to the most recent strikes, and how fast they get replaced plus how wide the strikes spread out give you a good idea of the activity level in the storm you're tracking.
Mostly the map will show a narrow red/yellow band with very sparse activity. The recent tornado outbreaks in the central plains give a much wilder picture, with ball shaped clusters of strikes within a huge irregular pattern of them, or traveling rows of them, as if each strike prompted the next, prompting the next, even sometimes unceasing piles hitting over and over in the same locations. Around midnight this morning Tennessee was almost completely covered, extending into neighboring states, with such a level of activity it was like watching colored popcorn popping nonstop. Come back 5 minutes later, same thing. Thirty minutes later, still going strong with maybe a hint of directional movement or spread from where you first saw it. There is a tiny window inside the program that you can click on to animate it, allowing you to see the long term movement of storms you were watching.
I presume the morning news will have more weather damage reports similar to the last few days.
The map can be tricky to navigate, something that only gets worse if you leave a tab open and return after a few minutes to see what's changed. My built in mouse pad is oversensitive as a navigation tool, sending me wildly off in random directions and changing the map's size unpredictably. I quickly learned to navigate using only the keyboard arrows: up down left and right. If left alone while I'm using other tabs, when I return I might find it traveling by itself to places off the map completely, and have to close out and reopen to start over. Those are minor irritations, and may well be me and not the software... except it only happens here. I find it worth figuring out the workaround.
So if you want a fascinating new view of what's happening when wild weather is really happening, I recommend this source:
https://www.lightningmaps.org/#m=oss;t=3;s=0;o=0;b=;ts=0;z=5;y=44.8403;x=-91.8018;d=2;dl=2;dc=0;
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