Arkansas Weather Watchers

Overview

Arkansas Weather Watchers is a statewide weather media platform delivering real-time forecasts, an interactive radar with storm-tracking layers, live NWS-style warnings and advisories, and educational resources for students and communities across Arkansas.

The Problem

During severe weather, residents need fast, trustworthy information in one place. Existing sources were scattered across apps and broadcasts, and slow, cluttered interfaces made it hard to act quickly on warnings.

The Solution

Built a fast, dark-themed React interface that combines geolocated forecasts, a live alerts ticker, and an interactive radar with toggleable layers (precipitation, storm cells, lightning, hail, rotation, tornado risk), a timeline player and a broadcast mode — powered by Tomorrow.io and OpenWeatherMap data.

Challenges

• Normalising data from multiple weather providers into one consistent UI model
• Keeping the radar timeline, layer toggles and live alerts responsive while data streams in
• Handling denied location permissions and API failures gracefully with clear retry states

Key Learnings

• Safety-critical UIs need clear hierarchy — warnings must be readable at a glance
• Designing loading, empty and error states up front matters as much as the happy path when depending on third-party APIs