Storm Chases WordPress Plugin

Storm Chases

This site runs on Storm Chases, a WordPress plugin I built to log storm chase days the way I actually think about them — date, states, miles, hail, wind, tornadoes witnessed, a GPS track, and the Spotter Network reports that went with it. It’s open source, free to use on your own WordPress site, and available on GitHub.

Get it on GitHub

What it does

  • Chase logs as a custom post type, accessible at /chases/YYYYMMDD/ — states chased, partners, miles, largest hail, highest wind, and a bullet-point list of milestones.
  • Tornado entries with name, EF rating, start/end coordinates and times, and a photo — reorderable by drag or arrow keys, with a click-to-place map for coordinates instead of typing lat/lon by hand.
  • GPS track upload (KML, GPX, or NMEA) with a start → end scrubber, automatic gap detection where signal was lost, outlier rejection for bad GPS fixes, and a historical NEXRAD radar overlay synced to wherever the scrubber is positioned.
  • Spotter Network report import via CSV, matched automatically to the right chase day.
  • Interactive maps — every tornado colored by EF rating, every spotter report colored by type (tornado, hail, wind, funnel cloud, wall cloud, damage) — on OpenStreetMap or Google Maps, with fullscreen and clickable detail popups.
  • Chase statistics — totals for chase days, tornado days, miles, hail, wind, and more, for all time or any single year.

Shortcodes and blocks

Everything below is available both as a classic shortcode and as a Gutenberg block (search “Tornado Map,” “Spotter Reports,” “Tornado List,” or “Chase Stats” in the block inserter) — the blocks add sidebar controls for things like EF-rating or report-type filtering that aren’t available as shortcode attributes.

[scarchive]          List of chases, filterable by year or count
[scstats]            Aggregated chase statistics
[sc_tornado_map]     Interactive map of all tornadoes, colored by EF rating
[sc_reports]         Interactive map + list of Spotter Network reports

See it in action

This is live data from this site — remove this section if you’d rather link out to an existing archive/map page instead of duplicating it here.

All-Time Chase Statistics

  • Chase Days: 434
  • Tornado Days: 108
  • Tornadoes: 232
  • Photogenic Tornadoes: 81
  • Miles Driven: 251,925
  • Number of States Chased: 25
  • Chase Days by State: Oklahoma: 206, Texas: 137, Kansas: 61, Michigan: 32, Nebraska: 31, Iowa: 22, Illinois: 20, Missouri: 18, Indiana: 15, South Dakota: 15, Colorado: 14, Arkansas: 11, New Mexico: 11, Mississippi: 9, Louisiana: 6, Minnesota: 6, North Dakota: 5, Tennessee: 4, Wisconsin: 4, Alabama: 3, Ohio: 3, Wyoming: 3, Florida: 2, Montana: 2, Alberta Canadian Flag: 1
  • Spotter Network Reports: 323
  • Largest Hail Observed: 4.75 in.
  • Highest Wind Observed: 100 MPH
  • Tornado Day Percentage: 24.88%
  • Tornadoes per Mile: 0.0009
  • Windshields Replaced: 9

All Tornadoes Map

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Get it for your own site

StormChases requires WordPress 6.1+ and PHP 7.4+. Download it from GitHub, upload the stormchases folder to /wp-content/plugins/ (or upload the ZIP directly through Plugins → Add New), then activate it and visit Storm Chases → Settings to choose a map provider and enable the fields you want. It’s released under the GPLv2 license — free to use, modify, and redistribute.

Found a bug or have a feature idea? Issues and pull requests are welcome on GitHub.