1992
Storm Tracking: The First Step

OmniWxTrac, the first integrated storm tracker, premiering at KFOR-TV in Oklahoma City.

By the end of 1992, Baron Services unveiled the result of its initial efforts: a ground-breaking storm tracking system called OmniWxTrac®, which for the first time integrated the only live and accurate data at the time: broadcasters' live radars, and the newly available strike-by-strike lightning from the National Lightning Detection Network (NLDN).

With OmniWxTrac, a trained meteorologist could zoom into any storm cell on-the-fly, and designate a current storm location, direction and speed. The system would then automatically produce a storm track while identifying communities threatened, along with estimated times of arrival, in a marquee box.

What was realized then which is equally true today, is that the average viewer is not very sophisticated.  He does not know, nor even care to know, how we determine a threat.  He has a difficult time fully understanding whether a threat will affect him. The more specific the broadcaster can be as to location, nearby landmarks, and time of threat measured within about the next 10 minutes, the greater the prospect he will be "called to action".

The system was pretty crude by today's standards, but it nonetheless redefined severe weather coverage. For the first time, viewers had accurate, specific information on which communities were affected, and approximately when. This was a tremendous improvement over announcing a county-wide warning, and the ability to zoom into a close-up of a storm, which seems so simple now, was tremendously innovative.

During the first year, we installed OmniWxTrac systems into six U.S. television stations: KFOR-TV and Mike Morgan; KJRH-TV and Gary Shore; WCCO-TV and Mike Fairborn; WMC-TV and Dave Brown; WBIR-TV and Martie Scholl, plus WAAY-TV, the station where I worked. In April of 1993, the system had its first big success in Tulsa, Okla. when Gary Shore projected, down to the minute, a truck stop in the path of a tornado—still a rare feat, even nowadays.

The product saw more success during a major tornadic outbreak in Alabama the following month, and our course was set. However, we understood that users needed greater speed and usability, so by the mid-1990s, the DOS-based OmniWxTrac was redesigned for the Windows platform as FasTrac®, which is still in use at so many stations around the country today.

The OmniWxTrac system is used on-air by KJRH-TV to alert citizens of an approaching tornado.

Lives were saved when Gary Shore, Chief Meteorologist at KJRH-TV, warned individuals at a truck stop about the danger.