Imprint and privacy

Who runs this site

Szabolcs Pápai, private individual.
Contact: hello@tornado-watcher.com

This is a non-profit educational project. There is no company behind it, no commercial activity, no advertising, and no sign-up.

What the site stores about you

Nothing is sent to a server about you. There are no accounts, no forms and no database. Your browser remembers four settings so the site opens the way you left it:

• the language you chose,
• the view you chose (night or atlas),
• the map layer you chose,
• whether you dismissed the welcome card.

These live only on your own device and disappear whenever you clear your browser data. The application sets no cookies.

Visitor counting

The site uses Vercel Web Analytics. It is cookie-free, does not track you across sites, and builds no personal profile. It sees aggregate figures: how many page views, on which page, roughly which country, what kind of device and browser, and where the visitor came from.

Third-party content

A few things load from other providers and follow their own privacy terms:

• YouTube. Recordings are embedded with the YouTube player from youtube-nocookie.com, which stores less than the standard one. On the map, the player loads only once you click a video; until then you see just the thumbnail. On the text event pages, however, the player loads as soon as the page opens, so Google's servers receive data there (IP address, browser) even if you never start a video. Playing one sends data in both places — this site cannot prevent that.
• Map tiles. The “Map” and “Satellite” layers download imagery from Esri. The “Drawn” layer is built into the application and makes no external request.
• Fonts. Served by Google Fonts.
• Hosting. The site is served by Vercel.

Sources and rights

• Map engine: Leaflet. Borders and coastlines come from the public-domain Natural Earth dataset. Downloadable map layers are provided by Esri.
• The recordings belong to the people who uploaded them. This site stores and downloads none of them: it embeds YouTube's own player, and every video stays on its uploader's channel. The title and channel name are credited on each one.
• If an uploader would rather their video not appear here, one message to the address above is enough and it comes down.
• Event data and descriptions are based on public meteorological records.

Accuracy

This site is for learning, not an official meteorological source. Mistakes are possible; if you spot one, I would be glad to hear about it.