When Maria woke before sunrise, she reached for her phone and saw an alert from her Tempest weather
station. Overnight, the temperature had dropped a startling 22 degrees. Yesterday afternoon, she had been sitting on the porch in short sleeves; now, as she stepped outside, her breath fogged the air.
Curious, she opened the Tempest app and watched a glowing wave of blue dots sweep across the USA, each dot representing another home where the same chill had just arrived. The cold front wasn’t just moving across the nation; it was moving through people’s backyards, one household at a time. You could see it coming hundreds of miles from you!
Across the Midwest and South, thousands of Tempest owners were seeing the same thing in real time.
Their stations, quiet and precise, reported the front’s arrival minute by minute. Every colored dot on the map showed not a forecast, but a measurement: the actual temperature at someone’s own home. What had always appeared as smooth graphics or broad cloud bands on satellite pictures was suddenly tangible and personal. This wasn’t how the weather was predicted to behave. This was how it was actually
happening.
Watching the cold air approach, they could prepare their day. Heavier jackets for the kids, cover delicate plants, and leaving for work earlier.
For generations, cold fronts have been shown as blue lines on static maps or as animated satellite imagery or radar that reveals only the movement of clouds and rain.
Those methods convey scale but not the human experience of weather at ground level. Our new visualization changes that perspective entirely. By animating real-time data from thousands of Tempest weather stations across the country, we reveal the cold front as it truly unfolds.
Each point is a home reading, a moment, a person’s lived experience, all stitched together into a living national picture.
This is more than a new way to see weather. It represents a shift in how we understand it. Viewers
can now watch a cold front as the nation feels it, its movement traced not in models or pixels, but in the real temperatures flowing through neighborhoods hour by hour.
It’s what happens when individual observations become collective insight, and when something invisible suddenly becomes clear.
Tempest will soon have similar animations for rain and wind events and weather geeks can visualize pressure changes as they approach rather than looking modeled isobar lines.
The weather future is YOURS! Join the 100,000 ordinary Tempest households that are making it happen.