WTAE-TV has "ESP Live," complete with "X-Vision." KDKA has "Viper" and "Future Scan" -- in 3D. WPXI boasts "TruView."

The fearsome-sounding high-tech gadgetry that television stations use to track severe weather was in full throttle during Wednesday night's mega-storm -- and may be hauled out for another round tonight.

While television viewers could count lightning strikes and track rotating storm cells over Turtle Creek, Connellsville and even Kennywood, neither they nor the meteorologists monitoring this powerful tempest knew if, when and where tornadoes might touch down.

None ever did, despite numerous sightings of funnel clouds from Twitter-ing, Flickr-ing storm watchers. The National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Allegheny and Westmoreland counties at 6:58 p.m. Wednesday, which meant they thought a tornado was imminent.

It wasn't.

"We have much better forecast models than we used to, but there's a lot that needs to be improved," said Dr. Joshua Wurman, who heads the Center for Severe Weather Research in Denver and who invented the first mobile "Doppler on Wheels" radar.

"We do pretty well at saying in the morning that tornadoes are a possibility in Pennsylvania or Kansas later today, or even two hours from now, but not if a particular storm is going to make a tornado in the next 15 minutes."

In fact, the false alarm rate for tornadoes has only dropped from 80 percent to 70 percent in the past decade, while the warning time for a tornado touchdown has only inched up a few minutes to 13 minutes.

"We'd kind of like it to be one hour," Dr. Wurman said.

He has just finished the first phase of Vortex2, a $12 million National Science Foundation-funded tornado research project, the largest and most ambitious ever undertaken. He returns to the field next May, but research results -- which require combing through hundreds of gigabytes of data -- won't be available for several years.

While the science creeps along, the television technology evolves at warp speed.

"I'll be blunt," he said. "TV stations love to hype their Doppler radar, but it's nothing really new. I'm not saying it's not useful, but it's nothing that the National Weather Service hasn't had for years."

Currently, there are about 100 National Weather Service Doppler radar sites across the country, enough to give a good picture of the weather, but not a perfect one.

"You'd have to have radar every 2 feet for that," added Dr. Greg Forbes, severe weather expert at The Weather Channel, who noted that efforts are under way at the University of Oklahoma to install low-cost radar on cell phone towers.

Still, the technology available to television meteorologists has "improved tremendously over the past 10 years," he said. "We have better display tools and better data, which used to be pretty crude and pretty incomplete."

These days, a television station's weather graphics and radar are designed to be viewer-friendly, said Jeff Verszyla, chief meteorologist at KDKA.

"Everyone has their own their little gadgets and gizmos to convey the same information to keep people safe and alert them if a storm is coming to their neighborhood," said Mr. Verszyla, who noted that it's at least now possible to predict where a storm will go in 20, 30 or 60 minutes -- even if they can't decisively say a tornado will go with it.

Wednesday's storm was unusual, said WTAE's meteorologist Demetrius Ivory. Typically, severe thunderstorms this time of year come after a hot, humid day, courtesy of a cold front marching across Ohio, moving at a rate of 30 to 60 miles an hour.

Wednesday's storm, by contrast, crossed the region at a relatively sluggish 14 miles an hour. "You could ride your bike or drive your car and outrun some of these storms," Mr. Ivory said. "Usually when a storm has no motion like that it coasts into neutral and dies, but not this one."

Indeed, this storm strengthened after the sun went down and dumped nearly 4 inches of rain in some places. And while it came at the end of a cool, overcast day, the dew point -- when water vapor in the air becomes saturated and condensation begins -- was 63, "which is pretty juicy," said Bob Coblentz, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service's office at Pittsburgh International Airport.

Late in the day, there was a "burp" in the atmosphere -- energy from an upper-level disturbance in the jet stream, which has been dipping unusually deeply into our region this year -- and voila: a storm, a big one, which had television viewers glued to their seats when they weren't headed to basements.

Despite some reports of exploding televisions during electrical storms, there's little data available on the risks of such an activity.

"I never heard of anyone being hurt by a television during a storm," said Dr. Wurman, who talks on the phone and watches television while driving his Doppler truck through some of the worst storms in America -- although he admits he lowers the truck's radar "mast" to discourage lightning strikes.

Of course, there was that time a few weeks ago, when, driving home in his Doppler truck after a long day at the office, Dr. Wurman and two fellow tornado researchers got stuck in Denver traffic -- during a tornado warning, which not surprisingly turned out to be a false alarm.

"Here we were in this truck full of storm tracking equipment, with the hail coming down, people stopped on the highway or hiding under bridges -- the worst place to be during a tornado. It would have been pretty ironic if we'd been killed that way."