Best weather server for alerts

[jmsikora]

Which (if any) of the weather nodeservers can supply weather alerts? I've seen some discussion on the topic but couldn't seem to find an answer to that question.

[MWareman]

Nodeservers poll - that’s not good for alerts! The only one I know that receives push events is the Ring nodeserver (and the result is it’s not available on Polisy or Rpi installs - only on PGC)

 

Takes a bit of effort to integrate, but I use this service:

 

https://www.illinoisstormchasers.com/weather-alerts-service.html

 

I don’t know about their geographic coverage - but I believe it to be nationwide U.S.

 

This uses your preregistered accurate location to send sms messages based on your location being inside a warning polygon. They are fast - I get the notice before any other source (even arriving simultaneously to the weather radio going off!).

 

I feed the SMS into my Flowroute account - and that sends a webhook to my AWS Lambda function. It parses the message and sends a webhook to my ISY Portal account - where I trigger a program to trigger an indoor siren on my Elk.

[GlowingHair]

I taught myself Python so I could write a script for my Raspberry Pi to poll the NWS periodically. It interfaces to my ISY, and from there to my Alexa devices to announce what's going on.

[MWareman]

If you are into polling for alerts - then you can feed your GPS location into this API endpoint to get a JSON response:

https://api.weather.gov/alerts/active?point=38.889805,-77.009056
(That's the location of the U.S. Capitol - in case you though I was putting my own location!)

All alerts nationwide are available at:
https://api.weather.gov/alerts/active

A nodeserver could possibly be written to poll less frequently for watches - and trigger a rapid polling when there is a storm watch for a given location for more rapid triggering of warnings.

[asbril]

I moved from Dark Sky to Climacel.  I am in north Miami and we are supposed to have heavy rains and strong winds later today and early tomorrow morning, because of hurricane  Isaias. However, this does not show in the Climacel forecasts. Maybe Climacel knows better than our local TV ?