Echoes Weather: Radar & Models

• METAR detail now shows present weather and flight category, with glossary entries explaining both • Added more weather stations (thank you for the bug report) • Fixed a rare layout hang on iOS 17.6 (thank you for the bug report) • Faster, more reliable METAR observation updates • Stability and performance improvements

New: Hurricane Season Mode Replay every hurricane in the official National Hurricane Center archive, going back to 1851. Browse named storms by year, then scrub through advisories to watch each one's forecast cone, track, and intensity evolve over time. Tap any point for category, winds, and pressure. Compare what the models predicted with multi-model spaghetti tracks. See where watches and warnings were posted along the coast. Hurricane Season Mode is included with Echoes Premium. This release covers historical storms; live tracking is on the way. Polish & Fixes • Onboarding experience tweaks • Forecast, Plot, and Sounding sheets now open correctly on the first tap. The blank white sheet glitch is gone. • Spotter and community reports no longer fail with a rate-limit error after restarting the app. Smoother Performance • Faster first launch on older devices. • Gate inspector readouts update at 60 fps as the loop animates. • Fixed a freeze a few seconds into satellite and MRMS playback. • Forecast model contours, wind barbs, and high/low markers now animate frame by frame instead of staying frozen on the first frame. • Cold launches land in the right mode without redundant network fetches.

New: Hurricane Season Mode Replay every hurricane in the official National Hurricane Center archive, going back to 1851. Browse named storms by year, then scrub through advisories to watch each one's forecast cone, track, and intensity evolve over time. Tap any point for category, winds, and pressure. Compare what the models predicted with multi-model spaghetti tracks. See where watches and warnings were posted along the coast. Hurricane Season Mode is included with Echoes Premium. This release covers historical storms; live tracking is on the way. New: Customize Your Basemaps Fine-tune each map style independently from Settings. Toggle roads, labels, POIs, buildings, county borders, terrain, and trails per style, even on styles you're not currently using. Dark Matter adds road-tier toggles (highways, major, minor) for a cleaner radar backdrop. Free users can pre-configure the premium styles too. Freehand drawings now persist when you switch tools or change map styles, with a trash button in the tools tray to clear them. (Thanks for the feature request!) Polish & Fixes • Onboarding experience tweaks • Forecast, Plot, and Sounding sheets now open correctly on the first tap. • Spotter and community reports no longer fail with a rate-limit error after restarting the app. • Theme sliders in Settings no longer hijack vertical scrolling. Press and hold to grab a slider; a haptic tap confirms it's armed. Smoother Performance • Faster first launch on older devices. • Gate inspector readouts update at 60 fps as the loop animates. • Fixed a freeze a few seconds into satellite and MRMS playback. • Forecast model contours, wind barbs, and high/low markers now animate frame by frame instead of staying frozen on the first frame. • Cold launches land in the right mode without redundant network fetches.

- bug fixes, performance enhancements, and faster load times (yay)

Two new map layers, plus stability fixes. • Tropical Weather Outlook. NHC's GTWO on the map: formation areas, disturbance markers (X), motion arrows, and named-storm pins. Tap any feature for the latest outlook discussion. Free for everyone. • River Gauges. NWPS gauges color-coded by flood category, with a peek-and-expand detail sheet. The hydrograph plots observed and forecast stage with threshold rules, a category-colored crest marker, and a long-press scrubber to read stage and flow at any instant. Premium. • Bug Fixes. Resolved a crash when switching basemap styles with river gauges visible, and a crash during model and satellite animation loads.

Stability fix for a rare crash during satellite animation loading.

Live hurricane season is here. • Live hurricane tracking: follow every active storm with the official NHC forecast cone, track, and current position, Saffir-Simpson intensity, and coastal watch and warning lines. Tap any storm for its full Public Advisory and Forecast Discussion. • Tropical Guidance (Premium): multi-model spaghetti plots, forecast and past wind extents, and NHC wind speed probability, plus the full 1851-to-present hurricane archive. • Dual Products (Premium): compare two radar products side by side on one synced map.

• Severe weather alert notifications now take you straight to the alert when tapped (thanks for the suggestion!) • Fixed a freeze that could interrupt radar animation during playback.

This update includes bug fixes and stability improvements

New: Air Quality layer! See real-time EPA AirNow air quality (AQI) for thousands of monitoring sites nationwide, color-coded by category, with per-pollutant detail (PM2.5, ozone, PM10) when you tap a site. Free for everyone :) ...aaaaand a bug fix :)

New: expanded satellite coverage. GOES imagery now switches across three regions, Pacific, CONUS, and Atlantic, with full-basin views to track tropical systems. This release also adds a Sea Surface Temperature product and UKMET and NAVGEM spaghetti tracks for tropical guidance. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

New: Storm Cross-Section. Draw a line across any storm to see a vertical slice of the atmosphere, revealing updraft cores, hail lofted above the freezing level, and the bright band. Switch between radar products (reflectivity, velocity, and more), step through the timeline to update the slice to any moment, and reference the freezing-level line. Available with Echoes Premium. GOES fire detection now renders as a live overlay on satellite imagery, so you can watch hot spots in context with the visible and infrared bands. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

New: 3D Storm Volume. Step inside a storm and explore its full structure in three dimensions. Echoes builds the radar's full volume scan into a rotatable 3D scene, so you can orbit the core, read echo tops, and see hail lofted above the freezing level highlighted right where it sits. A temperature axis with the freezing line runs alongside the volume, and wind barbs show the flow through the storm. Draw a box on the map to focus the scene on any region, switch between Volumetric and Isosurface views, and open it from any frame on the radar timeline to watch the storm build. Available with Echoes Premium. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

New: Air Quality Forecast. Tap any AirNow site to see the EPA air quality (AQI) outlook up to six days out, each day color-coded by category, with Action Day (Spare-the-Air) alerts flagged whenever an agency asks the public to cut back on emissions and outdoor exertion. A new health guidance section explains what the current air quality means for you, tuned to the dominant pollutant, and it is free for everyone. The full multi-day outlook, Action Day badges, and the forecaster's discussion are available with Echoes Premium. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

New: LIVE Sweep. Watch the radar work as it happens. Instead of waiting for a finished scan, Echoes streams each ray the moment the radar collects it, so you see the beam sweep around and paint the storm arc by arc. It is one continuous sweep, turning at the radar's real rotation rate. It runs on every NEXRAD radar, on any Level 2 product and any tilt, and because radars revisit the lowest tilt several times during a scan, you often catch the beam coming back around mid-scan. Available with Echoes Premium. Also new: real countdowns. The bottom bar now counts down to the next radar frame second by second, based on when the frame will actually arrive (this is still an estimate, and could be off by a couple seconds). In LIVE, it follows the radar's own scan schedule, so you know exactly when the beam will sweep your tilt again. Your subscription now works on all your devices at once. Premium follows your Apple ID, so using Echoes on an iPad no longer drops premium on your iPhone. It applies the next time you open the app; there is nothing to set up. Premium settings now survive a hiccup in your subscription status. A brief interruption could previously switch premium layers off and forget how you had them configured. Your settings stay put now. Alert polygons, mesoscale discussions, and your location marker now have outlines, so they stay readable over bright radar returns and light maps. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

Skew-T soundings are redesigned. On a phone, the sounding now fills the screen with a vertical layout: the Skew-T on top, the hodograph and key parameters below. Rotate to landscape for the full composite with parameter tables and vertical profiles. Alert outlines could turn solid black instead of the event color. This happened most often when the radar finished loading after the alerts. Outlines now keep their colors. River gauges and air quality sites now refresh when you switch radar sites with the coverage mask on. They kept the previous site's coverage before. Land Surface Temp no longer shows cold speckle from thin cloud, and its color range is retuned to match. LIVE Sweep now handles an uncommon scan pattern that could stop a sweep from loading. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

The Forecasts button now works both ways. Tap it on the map to open the forecasts hub. Tap it again to go back to the radar. The Done button is gone. Location cards in the hub now show today's high and low. Tap a card to open the full forecast for that place. The Plot and Sounding buttons show a lock if you do not have Premium. Charts have a new look. Temperature and dewpoint lines change color with the value, the same way station plots do on the map. Other chart colors are retuned for contrast. Radar and model color bars now print their minimum and maximum values. Skew-T soundings are easier to read on a phone. All text in the composite is larger. (Thanks for the feedback!) Precipitation Type showed the wrong tilt angle at some radar sites. It now matches Reflectivity and Velocity at the same tilt. Storm date ranges could show a day early. Dates now follow the advisory time. Station condition cards could disagree with the chart below them. The cards now use the newest observation. Flood and storm badges could show white text on a light background. Badge text now switches to black or white for contrast. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

Backdrop Light can now drop its 3D relief. The light basemap showed hillshade that looked like a topographic map. Open Map Layers and turn off Terrain & Trails for a plain light map. Historical radar times now line up. The chip, the scrubber, and the bottom bar show the same time, each one labeled with your local time zone. Some forecast hub cards showed a blank high and low. The preview now fills in. Plus faster radar and forecast loads, bug fixes, and stability improvements.

Some weather stations reported wind speeds that were too high. Station wind now reads correctly. Station cards also show whether the wind rises or falls. The Air Quality layer now includes nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and sulfur dioxide (SO2). Some monitors report no pollutant that Echoes maps. Those monitors no longer appear. Historical radar could show an empty map, and the play button did nothing. This happened when the product you picked had no data for that event. Playback now works. Hail size follows your unit setting. In metric units, hail shows in centimeters. This applies to spotter reports, Max Hail Size, and 3D Storm Volume. In US units, hail shows in inches. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.

Station cards show much more of each observation. New cards cover sea-level pressure, heat index, wind chill, visibility, cloud cover, and recent precipitation. You can also read the station's conditions text and the raw METAR report. A new humidity chart joins the history charts. The visibility chart was empty at most stations. It now fills in. Weather stations appear on the map sooner. Coverage is now even across the country. Before, some regions showed no stations until you zoomed in far. Official network stations now appear before personal weather stations as you zoom. Observed soundings could load forever at some stations. They now load in seconds. Skew-T winds follow your wind unit setting. Wind barbs, the hodograph, and shear values use knots, mph, or km/h, as you choose. Model visibility and ceiling layers now show flight categories: VFR, MVFR, IFR, and LIFR. Cloud Top Height and Cloud Top Pressure no longer show speckle where the satellite data is low confidence. Plus bug fixes and stability improvements.