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.

Who made it

The idea belongs to two primary-school pupils: Nándor Zénó Pápai and Gergely Palásti, students of the Fillér Street Primary School in Budapest, who wanted a map where you can watch the world's tornadoes in real footage. They built the texts and the code with the AI assistant Claude: they decided what should be on it and how it should look, the AI wrote it, and they tested it and had it fixed. The adult help (the operator above) went into checking the data, choosing the videos and putting the site online.

The site was made for the 2026 edition of <19 Formáld a világod! (“Shape your world”), a Hungarian competition for digital creations by people under 19.

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 three settings so the site opens the way you left it:

• the language you chose,
• 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.

When you open a tornado on the map, the address in your browser changes to that event. The counter sees this as another page view, so the totals show which tornadoes visitors open. This too is only an aggregate count, not tied to a person.

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.

Tornadoes are still being added. The list is not complete: new events and new recordings go up all the time. If you know of a tornado with good footage that is not on the map yet, write to the address above.