How Should I Track the Weather Before and During a Road Trip?

The NWS Enhanced Data Display shows bad weather icons along the route that, when clicked, reveal snow/ice levels, the probability of precipitation and amounts as well as the temperature, wind chill, dew point, relative humidity, and wind speed/maximum gusts/direction.  

3.  Enable Wireless Emergency Alerts

You should also make sure that your cellphone is set to receive Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA).  The WEA system is “a public safety system that allows customers who own compatible mobile devices to receive geographically targeted, text-like messages alerting them of imminent threats to safety in their area” regarding:

1. Alerts issued by the President of the United States
2. Alerts involving imminent threats to safety or life
3. Amber Alerts about missing children
4. Alerts conveying recommendations for saving lives and property

The WEA system does not track your location.  Instead, they push a message out to the cell towers in a particular geographic area, which will include your cellphone if it is WEA-capable, switched on, and in the vicinity of and receiving service from a cell tower of a wireless carrier that participates in WEA.  Because the alerts include imminent threats, you can receive timely and life-saving warnings about tornados, flash floods, hurricanes, dust storms, extreme wind, and tsunami at home and on your road trip.  If you generally keep those WEA notifications off, a road trip might be a good time to switch them back on temporarily.

B.  How to Track the Weather During a Road Trip

1.  The Weather Channel App

Have you ever heard of the weather proverb:  “The higher the clouds, the finer the weather”?  Sometimes reading the sky will give us a very clear weather forecast, and sometimes weather just happens.  

For example, let’s assume that you are four hours into your trip and, out of nowhere, it starts to rain.  If you want to determine the size, direction, and anticipated severity of the storm, it would help to have an interactive radar that will allow you to move the screen and adjust for the opacity of the clouds to see your vehicle’s location with respect to street names and highway numbers.  

Depending on the size of the storm, you also might need a few hours of future radar predictions to see where the storm is headed.  For example, on our last road trip to North Carolina, we ran into torrential rain coming and going on our trips east and west and had to decide whether to (1) choose a different route and avoid the storm, or (2) time our meals strategically so that we were eating while the worst of the storm passed overhead.  An interactive radar app that displays at least a few hours of future radar predictions is more likely to show you exactly when the highway will be free from cloud cover.

I think that the free Weather Channel app has some of the best interactive radar features.  Under “Settings,” you can allow the app to follow you to get the weather for your current location:

If you click on the map, you have the option of adding and determining the opacity of various layers for radar, etc.  

The app provides future radar information for 6 hours ahead (the paid version of the app gives your 24-hour future radar) as well as future 48-hour precipitation, snowfall, and a driving difficulty index.  There is also an option to receive severe weather alerts:

Checking the “Severe Storm/Tornadoes” box will give you detailed information regarding the threat of tornadoes, hail, wind, lightning, and flooding as indicated by round icons on the display:

If you click on those round icons, you will pull up two pages of detailed information concerning the particular alert: