Heloha
Work in Progress — this project is in early development. Nothing here is production-ready.
What is this?
Heloha is a personal severe weather analysis and alerting platform built specifically for Oklahoma. It pulls raw radar data directly from NOAA's public archives, processes it, and presents a unified, real-time picture of what's happening in the sky — without relying on a third-party weather service to tell you what to think about it.
The name comes from the Choctaw word for thunder.
Why build this?
Oklahoma sits in one of the most active severe weather corridors in the world. There are excellent commercial tools for watching weather, but they are built for a general audience. They smooth over the details, apply conservative thresholds, and optimize for not alarming people unnecessarily.
That's the right call for most users. It's not the right call when you want to understand what a storm is actually doing.
The goal here is to work directly with the underlying data — the same WSR-88D NEXRAD feeds that professional meteorologists use — and build tooling that answers the question a commercial app won't: is this storm becoming dangerous right now, and where is it going?
What we're trying to accomplish
- Ingest and parse real-time NEXRAD radar data for all Oklahoma-area radar sites (KTLX, KINX, KFDR, KVNX, and others)
- Fuse multiple radars into a single, seamless statewide picture, always using the best available coverage for any given point on the ground
- Identify and track storm cells automatically, following them across radar scans and building a history of their movement and intensity
- Detect severe signatures — tornadic vortex signatures (TVS) from velocity data, hail cores from differential reflectivity — and surface those as structured, actionable threat objects
- Present this cleanly in a browser-based map interface that updates in real time, with no heavy JavaScript framework required
The end state is a platform that gives a single operator a clear, honest read on severe weather across the state — updated every few minutes, with enough analytical depth to be genuinely useful during an active weather event.
Stack
Go · HTMX · Leaflet.js · NOAA NEXRAD (AWS S3) · Docker Compose · Prometheus