Is there a NOAA Severe Weather Alert device handler out there? if not, is there a similar-ish DTH you could point me to so I can make one before spring? I was wanting to bring alert information into webcore, specifically Hail alerts to automate hail protection.
@MinerJason Yes, I saw that one. Unfortunately the link is 404.
Thanks @JDRoberts, I’ll check there too. I didn’t realize WC had a built in WU API…if that pulls direct from NOAA, then that seems like a good route and quite simple. If WU doesn’t pull NOAA data, then I’d rather write something in groovy.
NOAA is the US national weather alert service for dangerous weather like hurricanes, but much more than that. It’s the scientific agency which monitors the oceans and the atmosphere. National oceanic and atmospheric agency.
So in the US there are alert devices and services which are triggered by “NOAA alerts.“
NOAA is a US government standardized service for timely reporting of severe events. I believe (could be wrong) that WU is fed by a different predictive forecasting model, but I’m searching.
NOAA is extremely accurate and timely and what is used for things like emergency weather radios and the like. Plus, it contains hail alerts which are not cheaply obtained. Our area (Texas\US) has gotten very bad hail over the last 5 years and it’s cost me a ton…automating protection is my goal rather than notification.
After a bit of digging, I’m pretty sure WU’s severe weather API is fed by MADIS which consists of NOAA data and other sources although since WU claims it’s proprietary it’s hard to say for certain.
The webcore documentation for weather.alerts.alerts.message is a NOAA example. Reads the same as what an emergency responder\radio provides in the same general order. I’m thinking the API might closely or completely rely on NOAA instead of it’s proprietary forecasting model with regard to severe events.
Regarding hail, NOAA publishes how these event driven reports should be formatted although it could vary since some NOAA sources are human. Essentially hail via credible reports, forecast, or observed hail would contain keywords to extract or simply by the case-insensitive word hail. Alerts.message for alerts of type SVR with the word or specific guidelines regarding size seems like it will work. I suspect WU translates coordinates to county but not completely sure.
I think I will do a simply SVR + “hail” piston to a virtual switch and a more general alert to email notification piston for awhile and see if i’m getting what I want. If not, the weather.gov site provides a public JSON API (also an RSS and more general web scraping).
Since I’m exploring webCore as an option, I’ll link below to the webCore topic I created.
Although this is for a specific non-emergency purpose, I’m sort of interested in seeing if there is a long term more convenient way to get alerts in realtime but still have the ol’ AM radio on battery backup.
I’ll have to think about it more but for sure offloading the NOAA API processing calls to a battery backed PC\Server\Pi\whatever\switch\router\etc that can integrate locally and has a simple fallback (switch on radio). I’ve not found a great emergency radio that is configurable enough that it doesn’t wake us multiple times a night (we get quite a few in spring and fall).