Storm Recon is a “situational awareness” engine for people who travel and live in vehicles, RVs or campers. It actively monitors weather service data for threats and suggests appropriate escape options to pass along to your navigation app. It’s built to give advance notice of anything serious enough to move for. It won’t wake you up and make you do all the work - it comes with a detailed explanation of what’s coming, how long you’ve got and where you can go to safely avoid it.
HOW IT WORKS
• Open the app when you park. That's how it knows where to watch.
• It reads the National Weather Service watches, warnings and advisories for your location, and the exact safety instructions the forecast office wrote.
• When something is heading your way you get a plain-English card: what it is, when it arrives, when you'd need to leave, and what it means for a rig like yours in particular.
• One tap maps up to three ranked places to go, based on your preferences, each with its reasoning written out: "lowest drive time, Min. 18mi clear of hail, State park."
• Pick one and it hands the route to your preference of Google Maps, Apple Maps or Waze, sets a departure reminder, and gives you a number to call ahead. Want even more options in the area? Just a tap away.
WHY NOT JUST A WEATHER APP
The emergency alerts that blare on everyone's phone never carry watches — and the watch is where the lead time lives. Fourteen hours before the Guadalupe River flash flood. Seventy-six hours before the January 2026 winter storm, which killed more than a hundred people and for which that system sent nothing at all.
Navigation apps will route you into a flooding town at 2 a.m. and never say don't. Trip planners help you choose the site, then go quiet once you arrive.
Storm Recon is the one that's watching when nobody asked it to.
WHAT'S IN IT
• Animated radar over your location, with a look-ahead radius set to 24, 48 or 72 hours
• Hourly and daily conditions from Apple Weather
• Watches, warnings and advisories from the National Weather Service, with the issuing office quoted rather than paraphrased, plus severe-weather outlooks from the NOAA Storm Prediction Center
• Wildfire perimeters and satellite hotspots, plus live evacuation orders from the California, Oregon and Washington emergency feeds, in the authority's own words.
• Destinations from federal campgrounds (Recreation.gov, National Park Service), private RV parks (OpenStreetMap) and dry-camping stops, with hookup power and amenities where the data confirms them
• Rig-aware: tell it you drive a Class A, a van, a fifth wheel, a truck camper or a semi, and it changes what it warns you about and how early
• Three levels of interruption — in-app only, a quiet badge, or tell me — plus Critical Alerts for declared emergencies, which can sound through a muted phone
WHAT'S NOT
We don't forecast the weather, and never try to out-guess the National Weather Service. Every warning in Storm Recon came from them. What the app adds is that it reaches you, where you are, in time.
And a good first mate doesn't cry wolf: it stays quiet on a fine day, and when there's genuinely nowhere better to go it says so instead of inventing a route.
PRIVACY
No account, no sign-in, no ads, no tracking. Your precise location never leaves your phone. Turn notifications on and we send your area — rounded on the device to about a 50-kilometre square — plus the delivery address Apple issues for this app and your alert settings. Location is read only while the app is open. Your secret fishing spot stays a secret.
COVERAGE
The United States, wherever the National Weather Service reaches — Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico included. Outside it the app says "outside coverage area", never a green all-clear. Canada is planned for later.
Sources: Apple Weather · NWS/NOAA · RainViewer · Recreation.gov · National Park Service · OpenStreetMap · CARTO · USGS · NIFC · NASA FIRMS. Full attribution in Settings → About.
