The Locations Map
The Locations page has two views — a list and a map. The map shows your properties against live weather: what is happening now, what is forecast, and what the outlook centers expect over the coming days.
Everything on the map is optional. Open the Layers panel in the top right to turn things on and off.
On a phone the panel opens as a sheet from the bottom of the screen. It groups the layers into sections you can expand one at a time, and a section that already has something turned on shows what it is, so you can see the state of the map without opening every section. On a wider screen the panel opens as a list with every section expanded.
What you can display
Weather overlays
- Radar — NWS MRMS base reflectivity, with a playback control for stepping through the last several frames
- NWS Alerts — active watch, warning and advisory polygons, colored by severity. Click one to read the headline and instructions
SPC outlooks
Storm Prediction Center convective and fire weather outlooks, Days 1 through 3. For severe weather you can view the categorical outlook or the individual tornado, hail, wind and combined probabilities.
See SPC Outlooks for what the categories mean.
WPC outlooks
- Rain — the Excessive Rainfall Outlook, Days 1 through 5
- Winter — winter precipitation probability, Days 1 through 7
See WPC Outlooks for the categories and probability bands.
Forecast layers
Every gridded forecast product LMKwhen alerts on can be displayed, grouped by category:
| Group | Layers |
|---|---|
| Temperature & Heat | Heat Risk, WBGT, Max Temp, Min Temp, Apparent Temp |
| Winter | Snowfall 72-hr, Ice Accum |
| Wind | Wind Speed, Wind Gust |
| Precipitation | Total Precip, Precip Chance |
| Humidity | Min Humidity, Max Humidity |
| Tropical | Wind / Surge / Rain / Tornado Threat, tropical wind probabilities |
One forecast layer displays at a time — these cover the whole country, so stacking two would just hide the lower one.
See NDFD Forecasts for what each product measures.
Choosing a forecast time
When a forecast layer is on, a Valid control appears. It lists the exact times the National Weather Service has published for that layer, so the choices differ by product:
- Wind, gusts, WBGT and apparent temperature are hourly
- Accumulations like snowfall and precipitation are 6-hourly
- Heat Risk and high/low temperature are daily
- Tropical threat layers publish only while a National Hurricane Center advisory is active, so they often have a single time — or none at all
The map opens on the next upcoming forecast time. Use the arrows to step forward or back.
Legends
Every forecast layer has a legend in the bottom left, and it comes directly from the National Weather Service — the same color scale used to draw the map itself. Categories like Heat Risk and the tropical threat levels show a labelled swatch for each level; continuous fields like temperature and wind speed show a color bar with values marked along it.
If more than one layer has a legend, use the arrows in the legend header to page between them, or collapse the panel entirely.
Hurricane tracks and cones
Turn on any Tropical layer and an extra control appears for the National Hurricane Center forecast track. It draws, for every active tropical system:
- the forecast track the storm is expected to follow
- the cone of uncertainty around it
- the advisory positions, marked D, S, H or M for depression, tropical storm, hurricane and major hurricane
The threat layers tell you what a storm could do to a particular place. The cone tells you where the storm is expected to go. They are most useful together.
Filtering by collection
The Collections section of the Layers panel filters which of your locations appear. Tick more than one and you see all of them — ticking a second collection widens the view rather than narrowing it.
The same filter is available in the list view toolbar, and both stay in step. Because the selection is stored in the page address, you can bookmark a filtered view or send the link to a colleague.
Stepping through today's hazards
When anything in your account is alerting, a bar appears at the bottom of the map. It lists one stop per weather layer behind those alerts — a tornado warning, an enhanced severe risk, a heat exceedance — with the number of alerts and affected locations for each.
- Arrows step to the previous or next hazard
- Play walks through them on its own, 30 seconds each, with a countdown showing when the next one arrives
Each stop shows that hazard on its own — the other layers switch off — and moves the map to fit the locations it is affecting, so you can see the weather and whose property is under it at the same time.
Stepping by hand pauses playback, and so does changing anything in the Layers panel: the tour never overrides a choice you have just made. The map never turns layers on by itself.
Opacity
Forecast layers default to 40% opacity so your properties and any active warnings stay readable on top of them. The Opacity slider adjusts this whenever a forecast layer is on.
What draws on top of what
Layers always stack in the same order, whatever order you turn them on in:
- Your locations — always on top, never covered by weather
- Radar
- NWS watches, warnings and advisories
- SPC and WPC outlooks, and hurricane tracks
- Forecast layers, at the bottom
Your properties are the point of the map, so nothing is ever allowed to hide them.
Coverage
Radar covers the continental US, Alaska, Hawaii, the Caribbean and Guam, selected automatically from where the map is centered. Forecast layers, SPC outlooks and WPC outlooks cover the continental US. If you pan somewhere a layer does not reach, the map tells you rather than showing an empty overlay.