NashvilleWeather.Org

Live Weather Tracker

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About NashvilleWeather.Org

Nashville and Middle Tennessee's Free Live Weather Dashboard

NashvilleWeather.Org is a free, community-focused live weather dashboard built for the people of Nashville and Middle Tennessee. It delivers real-time weather data, interactive radar, live lightning strike tracking, NWS storm reports, river gauge levels, air quality and pollen counts, detailed forecasts, severe weather alerts, power outage tracking, and local emergency news, all in one place, with no app downloads, no subscriptions, and no paywalls.

What NashvilleWeather.Org Does

The dashboard provides a comprehensive, at-a-glance view of current and upcoming weather conditions for the Nashville metro area and surrounding Middle Tennessee counties. It combines data from multiple trusted sources into a single, fast-loading interface designed to be useful whether you're checking the morning forecast or tracking a severe storm in real time.

Interactive Radar

Powered by RainViewer and displayed on an interactive Leaflet.js map, the radar offers three modes: Past Loop (animated playback of the last roughly two hours of past frames), Live (the single most recent frame), and Forecast (Next 2h) (a forward-looking RainViewer nowcast showing short-term precipitation projection up to about two hours ahead — when nowcast frames are unavailable from the upstream API, the panel falls back to the latest live frame and notes this in the timestamp badge). Full playback controls let you step through frames, adjust opacity, and zoom to any area in the region. Radar frames auto-refresh every five minutes.

Live Lightning Strike Overlay

An optional real-time lightning overlay plots individual strike locations directly on the radar map. Strike data comes from Blitzortung.org, a global volunteer lightning detection network, delivered through a Netlify serverless function that collects strikes within the Middle Tennessee bounding box and serves them as GeoJSON. Fresh strikes pulse on the map and fade to static dots as they age. The overlay polls every 30 seconds when enabled and automatically drops strikes older than 20 minutes to keep the map clean and current.

NWS Local Storm Reports Map

A dedicated Storm Reports tab shows verified ground-truth reports submitted to the NWS Nashville office (OHX) and sourced from the Iowa State Mesonet GeoJSON feed. Reports are plotted on a second interactive Leaflet map and categorized by type, including tornadoes, funnel clouds, large hail, wind damage, and flash flooding. A time-window selector lets you review reports from the past 24 hours, the past 72 hours, or the past 7 days. The report list updates every 3 minutes.

48-Hour Hourly Forecast

A detailed hour-by-hour forecast table showing temperature, weather conditions, precipitation probability, and wind speed for the next two full days. A precipitation probability bar chart gives an at-a-glance look at the next 12 hours. Data comes from Open-Meteo, a free open-source weather API. Forecasts refresh every 15 minutes.

16-Day Daily Forecast

A 16-day outlook showing daily high and low temperatures with visual temperature range bars, weather conditions, and precipitation probability. Each day's forecast is presented as a compact card with color-coded temperature gradients that make it easy to spot trends at a glance. Today's card is highlighted for quick reference.

Environmental Conditions Strip

A secondary conditions row beneath the main current weather grid shows four environmental data points that update together every 20 minutes.

  • Air Quality (US AQI) from the Open-Meteo air quality API, including PM2.5 and ozone readings with a plain-language advisory for the current AQI category.
  • Pollen levels combining grass, ragweed, alder, and birch pollen grain counts into a single peak severity label ranging from Very Low to Very High.
  • Sunrise and Sunset times for the current day, with a dynamic label showing whether the next event is a sunrise or sunset and a countdown to that time.
  • Moon Phase calculated from the current Julian date, showing the phase name and illumination percentage for the current night.

USGS River Gauge Levels

Live river stage readings from six USGS Water Services gauges covering the major waterways in Middle Tennessee. Each gauge shows the current water level in feet, the change from the previous 24 hours, and a flow rate in cubic feet per second where available. Gauge data refreshes every 15 minutes.

  • Cumberland River at Nashville
  • Harpeth River at Kingston Springs
  • Stones River at Walter Hill
  • Mill Creek near Antioch
  • Red River near Adams
  • Duck River above Columbia

Severe Weather Alerts

Real-time severe weather alerts from the National Weather Service Nashville office (OHX). Alerts are fetched from the NWS API, filtered to the NWS Nashville forecast area, and color-coded by severity from minor advisories to extreme warnings. The most urgent active alert appears as a sticky banner at the top of the page; tapping the banner — or any alert card in the Alerts tab — opens the full official notice on weather.gov in a new tab. Alerts auto-refresh every five minutes.

Nashville Power Outage Tracker

Live power outage data from Nashville Electric Service (NES), showing the number of active outage events, total customers affected, crews dispatched, and crews still awaiting assignment. The severity level updates dynamically from Normal through Moderate, Elevated, and Critical based on the total number of customers without power. The tracker updates every five minutes and includes direct links to the NES outage map and the NES outage hotline at 615-234-0000.

Weather-Reactive Background Themes

The dashboard background and accent colors shift automatically to reflect current conditions. Thunderstorms trigger a deep storm palette, snow and ice trigger a cool icy tone, rain shifts to a muted blue-grey, fog softens the interface, and clear warm days brighten the accent colors. The theme is driven by the current WMO weather code and temperature reported by Open-Meteo.

Weather and Emergency News

RSS feeds from Nashville area sources including WKRN, Fox 17 (WZTV), the Tennessean, and the NWS Nashville CAP alert feed are filtered by keyword to surface only weather-related, storm-related, power outage, flood, and emergency stories. The keyword list covers everything from tornadoes and flooding to road closures and burn bans, giving you a focused news feed that cuts through general headlines. The news feed refreshes every 15 minutes.

Social Updates

Quick links to the most important weather and emergency accounts on X (formerly Twitter), including @NWSNashville, @NashSevereWx, @NESpower, @ABORANA (TEMA), and @NC5.

Data Sources

All data used by NashvilleWeather.Org comes from free, publicly available sources. No API keys or paid subscriptions are required to run the site.

  • Open-Meteo — Current conditions, hourly forecasts, 16-day daily forecasts, air quality, pollen, sunrise, and sunset
  • National Weather Service (NWS) API — Severe weather alerts for Middle Tennessee
  • Iowa State Mesonet — NWS Local Storm Reports GeoJSON feed for the OHX forecast area
  • RainViewer — Radar imagery (past loop, current, and forecast/nowcast tiles)
  • Blitzortung.org — Real-time lightning strike data via Netlify serverless function
  • USGS Water Services — Real-time river stage and streamflow for six Middle Tennessee gauges
  • Nashville Electric Service (NES) — Live power outage data via the UtiliSocial public API
  • OpenStreetMap — Base map tiles for the interactive radar and storm reports maps
  • Nashville area RSS feeds — Local weather and emergency news from WKRN, Fox 17, the Tennessean, and NWS Nashville

Who Made This

NashvilleWeather.Org is created by Nashua Labs, a Nashville-based development studio. The site is a community project. It is free to use, contains no paywalls, and is not affiliated with any government agency, news outlet, or commercial weather service.

Technical Details

The site is a static web application built with vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. There are no frameworks and no build steps. It uses Tailwind CSS via CDN for styling, Leaflet.js for interactive maps, and two Netlify serverless functions: one for RSS feed proxying and NES outage data aggregation, and one for collecting and caching Blitzortung lightning strike data via a short-lived WebSocket connection. The entire site loads in under 400 KB before radar tiles.

All auto-refresh intervals are tuned to balance freshness with API courtesy. Alerts, radar, and outage data refresh every 5 minutes. Hourly forecasts and news refresh every 15 minutes. Daily forecasts refresh every 30 minutes. Environmental data including air quality, pollen, and sun and moon data refreshes every 20 minutes. River gauge data refreshes every 15 minutes. Storm reports refresh every 3 minutes. Lightning strikes refresh every 30 seconds when the overlay is enabled.

The site is deployed on Netlify and the source code is open source under the MIT license.

Contact

Questions, feedback, or feature requests? Email info@nashualabs.com.

NashvilleWeather.Org is not affiliated with the National Weather Service, Nashville Electric Service, USGS, Blitzortung.org, any local news station, or any government entity. Weather data is provided for informational purposes only. Always follow official NWS guidance during severe weather events.