Storm Sensei watches the sky around a single point — the course you selected — and tells you when conditions there stop being safe. It does not wait for you to notice the weather. It does not wait for a general area forecast to catch up.
This page explains exactly what each warning level means, what triggers it, and what you should do.
What it means. Conditions look clear. No hard threat indicators at this time. Monitor conditions and re-check regularly.
What triggers it. None of the conditions below are met.
What to do. Play on, and keep an eye on the sky. Clear means nothing has crossed a threshold yet — it is not a forecast that nothing will.
What it means. Storm activity in the area, or lightning detection that can't be confirmed clear. Conditions warrant close monitoring. Know your shelter route.
What triggers it. Any one of the following is enough:
What to do. Decide now where you would go, and how long it would take to get there. Watch is the level at which you still have time to make an unhurried decision.
What it means. Lightning nearby — prepare to shelter. Lightning activity within range. Be ready to leave the course.
What triggers it. Any one of the following is enough:
What to do. Start moving. Finish the hole you are on only if shelter is genuinely close. A Flash Flood Warning changes the advice — seek higher ground rather than simply going indoors.
What it means. Lightning danger — seek shelter now. Lightning detected close by. Head to shelter immediately.
What triggers it. Either of the following:
What to do. Go, now. Six miles is roughly the distance at which the next strike can reach you. A substantial building or a fully enclosed metal vehicle. Not a cart, not a tree, not a shelter hut.
A warning is never based on one number. Storm Sensei reads several independent sources and weighs them together.
Ground lightning network. A commercial weather data provider reports cloud-to-ground and in-cloud strikes with location and time, covering 10 miles around you over the last 5 minutes. This is the sharpest picture of what has just happened close by.
Satellite lightning detection. A geostationary weather satellite detects lightning flashes independently, covering 25 miles over the last 30 minutes. The ground network's window is capped at 5 minutes by our data plan, so the satellite is what carries the longer history — the two are merged together rather than one standing in for the other.
Official warnings. Active National Weather Service watches and warnings for your location. The four products listed under Warning above raise the level regardless of what the strike data shows.
Storm movement. By comparing where strikes were a few minutes ago against where they are now, the system estimates the direction a storm is moving, how fast, and how long until it reaches you. That estimate is what drives the arrival-time triggers on every level.
Radar. Radar imagery is shown on your map so you can see the storm for yourself. It is display only — no radar value sets your alert level.
On-site conditions. Where a venue has a local weather station, its readings are used in preference to a more distant one. Its lightning counts can raise your level to Watch and can support a Warning, but an on-site sensor alone is never enough to declare Danger — that always requires network or satellite detection.
The wording you read in an alert is generated by an AI model, so it can describe your specific situation in plain language rather than handing you a template.
The level itself is decided before the model is ever asked. A fixed set of rules — the thresholds listed above — computes the minimum level the conditions justify. The model's answer is then compared against that minimum and raised to it if it falls short. It can add urgency. It can never state a milder situation than the data supports.
If the model is slow, unreachable, or returns something unusable, the alert is still delivered using the rule-based level and standard wording. There is no path where a model failure produces a quieter alert than the conditions warrant.
With the app open, conditions are re-checked every 5 minutes. With the app closed, a background sweep runs every 5 minutes and sends a notification if your level has changed.
There is no push between those sweeps. In the worst case — conditions crossing a threshold moments after a sweep finishes — a notification can be up to about 5 minutes behind the change, plus the few seconds it takes to gather data. We would rather state that plainly than imply the app is watching continuously.
Danger alerts are sent three times in quick succession, because a single notification is easy to miss.
Alerts arrive as Time Sensitive notifications, which are designed to reach you even when your phone is in a Focus mode — provided that Focus allows Time Sensitive notifications or has Storm Sensei in its allowed apps.
Storms are not steady. A cell can pass, quiet down, and rebuild in the same twenty minutes. If the system returns to Clear and then escalates again shortly after, that is the storm behaving normally, not the system being indecisive.
There is no damping. The level always reflects the conditions at the most recent check — it is not held at a higher level for a set period once conditions ease. That is a deliberate choice: it means the level never lags a genuine escalation.
Storm Sensei evaluates conditions at one point, not along your whole round.
With the app open, that point starts where you set it — the course you selected, or your position if you used Use Current Location.
It does not follow you continuously. The five-minute re-checks always evaluate the same point, so walking a few holes does not move it on its own. Where it can change depends on how you set it. If you chose your course by name, that point stays fixed for the whole round — bringing the app back to the foreground re-checks conditions there, but never moves the point off the course you chose. If you used Use Current Location, the point follows your device: bringing the app to the foreground after a minute or more away re-reads your GPS and evaluates from where you actually are. Either way, tapping My Location on the map moves the point to your current position.
With the app closed on iPhone, your position is updated in the background as you move, at roughly 0.7-mile granularity, and notifications reflect where your phone actually is, even if the screen is set to a course you chose. On Android, notifications are based on the place you set in the app; Android doesn't track your location in the background. In a browser, background location isn't available, so notifications reflect the last place set in the app.
It does not predict where lightning will strike. Nobody can. It reports where lightning has already struck, how close, how recently, and which direction the storm is moving.
It does not replace your own judgment. If the sky looks wrong, leave. A warning that has not fired yet is not permission to stay out.
It cannot reach you if your phone is off, out of signal, or has notifications disabled for Storm Sensei.
If we change any of the values on this page, or how an alert level is decided, we will tell you inside the app the next time you open it. We will not change them silently.
