Maverick Weather takes the official forecasts published by government weather agencies and draws them. It is not a forecasting agency, it issues no warnings, and nothing on it should be the last thing you read before making a decision about your safety.
Where the data comes from
Every storm on this site comes from one of two official warning centres, and each graphic says which:
- NOAA/NHC — the United States National Hurricane Center, which warns for the Atlantic and the eastern and central Pacific.
- JTWC — the Joint Typhoon Warning Center, a United States Navy and Air Force unit that warns for the western Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the Southern Hemisphere.
The NWS Guide section is about a third source — the National Weather Service's public API and the messages its Senior Duty Meteorologist posts about how the service itself is running. That section explains someone else's data too.
We are not affiliated with any of them. They publish; we read what they publish, normalise it into one shape, and draw it.
What "derived" means here
Every graphic on this site is drawn by us from the agency's own numbers. The forecast track you see is the warning centre's forecast positions joined into a line; the intensity chart is their forecast winds. Nothing is smoothed, extrapolated or filled in. Where a source publishes no value, the graphic shows none rather than guessing one.
One rule is worth stating plainly because it is the easiest one to get wrong: the cone of uncertainty is official NHC GIS data and appears only on NHC storms. We never manufacture a cone for a JTWC storm by drawing a buffer around its track. A shape that looks like a cone but is not one would be the most dangerous thing this site could publish.
One place the word appears on the site is the Status column of a storm's forecast timeline. The two centres publish differently: NHC classifies most of its forecast points and leaves some blank, while JTWC gives a forecast wind at every step and no development stage at all. Where the centre stated a stage, that is what the column shows. Where it did not, the stage is worked out here from the centre's own forecast wind using the standard thresholds, and the row is marked derived — the positions and winds are theirs, the label is ours. Where the centre stated nothing and there is no wind to work from, the column shows an em dash and says so under the table. It never guesses, and it never prints a classification we cannot put into words.
The words in the Status column
A forecast point's stage, in the terms the warning centres use. These are development stages, not intensities: a storm's category comes from its wind, which is shown beside it.
- Tropical depression
- A closed circulation with maximum sustained winds below 34 kt (39 mph).
- Tropical storm
- 34 kt up to 64 kt (39–73 mph). The stage at which a system is named.
- Hurricane / typhoon
- 64 kt (74 mph) or more. The same storm by two names: hurricane in the Atlantic and eastern Pacific, typhoon in the western Pacific.
- Super typhoon
- A western-Pacific typhoon at 130 kt (150 mph) or more.
- Subtropical depression / storm
- A system with both tropical and mid-latitude characteristics — it draws energy from a temperature contrast as well as from warm water. Winds and hazards are real; the structure is not fully tropical.
- Post-tropical cyclone
- A former tropical cyclone that has lost its tropical structure. It can still be dangerous — Sandy was post-tropical at landfall — which is why the centre keeps naming it.
- Extratropical
- A cyclone driven by the temperature contrast between air masses rather than by warm ocean, with fronts rather than an eye. Ordinary winter storms are extratropical.
- Remnant low
-
What is left when a tropical cyclone loses its organised thunderstorm activity: a
low-pressure area with a circulation and little else, no longer meeting the definition of
a tropical cyclone. The warning centres file it under the code
LO, and a forecast that ends in one is a forecast that the system will dissipate. A remnant low can still carry rain, and it can occasionally redevelop. - Disturbance / tropical wave
- An area of disturbed weather that may or may not become a cyclone. These usually appear as areas to watch rather than as forecast points.
Model guidance is not the forecast
Some storms carry a model-guidance graphic — a bundle of individual model runs, sometimes called a spaghetti plot. It is there because it is genuinely informative about how confident the forecast is. It is labelled as non-official everywhere it appears, and it always sits below the official track, because a striking picture is easy to mistake for an authoritative one.
Four clocks, kept apart
A weather page that shows one timestamp is hiding three. Every storm page shows all four:
- Forecast cycle
- When the forecast itself was initialized. The National Hurricane Center runs its forecast on the synoptic hour — 00, 06, 12 or 18 UTC — and issues the advisory built on it up to six hours later, so this is normally earlier than the advisory below it. It is the time the track graphic names, and the time each forecast hour counts from.
- Advisory issued
- When the warning centre published the advisory. This is the one that matters.
- Source retrieved
- When we fetched it. Occasionally a few minutes before the advisory's own stamp: NHC posts a product to its servers slightly ahead of the nominal hour printed on it. Both times are shown as measured rather than tidied into an order that looks tidier.
- Site published
- When we finished drawing the graphics for this storm.
The gap between the advisory and the last is our latency. The age of the advisory is the age of the forecast, and it is the one shown beside each storm.
When something is missing
Sources go down, and an outage looks exactly like quiet weather if a site is careless about it. This one is not. If we cannot reach a source, the page says so; if data is older than the issuing centre's own schedule would predict, the storm it belongs to says so. An empty list means an empty ocean only when we can confirm it.
Malformed or incomplete data never replaces a good previous state. When an update cannot be trusted, the last coherent one is kept and labelled as retained rather than thrown away — a stale forecast that says it is stale is more useful than a blank page.
You can see the current condition of every feed on the data health page, which is also what the indicator in the top bar reads from.
Counting readers, without tracking them
We keep a rough count of which pages get read, so we know what is worth the effort. It is first-party — the count is ours, sent to our own server, and shared with nobody. It uses no cookies and stores no identifier of any kind: not your IP address, not a device fingerprint, nothing that could tie one page view to another or to you. Each view is a single, standalone tally.
What a page view records is deliberately coarse: the path you looked at, the host of the site you arrived from (never the full link, which stays in your browser), a rough size band for your window, whether you are in light or dark mode, and a two-letter country that our network edge derives without us ever seeing your address. Those counts are rolled up into a daily total and nothing finer is kept.
If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, we check it before sending anything — so nothing about your visit leaves your browser at all. The count is also best-effort: if the machine that receives it is down, that view is simply lost. We do not queue it, and for a page-view tally that is a fine trade.
Do not use this for a life-safety decision
If a storm is heading for where you are, close this site and read the official one. In the United States that is weather.gov and the National Hurricane Center; elsewhere it is your own national meteorological service. Follow the instructions of your local emergency management authority over anything you read here.
For developers
Everything the site draws is available as JSON. The
Storm API is a small set of static objects fetched with a plain
GET — no key, no signup — and each graphic ships a provenance sidecar tracing
it back to the exact agency issuance it came from.