Random thoughts I want to share.
Today is going to be a severe weather day at my location. Good day to test alerts. I use the NWS NOW app on Android for my primary alerting mechanism on my phone (great ad-free app - must have if you live in the USA and love weather - as it tracks every NWS alert and allows you to read forecast discussions and other features). The app developer states in the introduction paragraph that “NWS NOW is a free weather application with no advertising, no tracking using the National Weather Service and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration API”.
I am also now using RemindR with the Weather 3.0 Engine and the ST “Severe Weather Alert” built in app from the Marketplace. I am trying to compare what alerts I receive. This is a testing phase for my project.
The day started with a Hazardous Weather Outlook push notification from the NWS NOW Android app. No alerts from RemindR (as expected as it is not an option) and no alerts from the built-in Severe Weather Alert SmartApp. I could do without this push notification for this specific ‘outlook’ but no way to pick and choose in the Android app - its all or nothing, and there are no options to configure any specific alerts in the Samsung Severe Weather SmartApp.
A few hours later and next came the Flash Flood Watch. Now we’re talking. I received that push notification from the NWS NOW Android app, no alerts from RemindR (as expected as it is not an option), but I did receive an alert from the built-in Severe Weather Alert SmartApp.
An hour later we received a Severe Thunderstorm Watch. I received that push notification from the NWS NOW Android app, and I received the alert from RemindR (as expected as it is an option), and I received an alert from the built-in Samsung Severe Weather Alert SmartApp.
Next will come the Thunderstorm Warnings but as I type it the storms are not here yet. I suspect and assume I will be alerted for these alerts from all three sources listed above.
All of this got me to thinking. What is the “source” of the code universe for weather alerting, i.e., the “mothership” of codes, available to the code-writers for SmartApps, to configure any imaginable selection of what alerts you wish to receive? Does RemindR / Weather 3.0 and the Samsung Severe Weather Alerts SmartApp pull from this same source?
I do not (yet) know how to code, but I saw abbreviations in the RemindrProfiles SmartApp code that looked similar to reminders I found looking around the internet. There is a wunderground Weather API that also has this coding system, but there are 19 codes in wunderground, compared to the 12 codes in the RemindrProfile, and neither set of codes has a Winter Storm Watch which I am positive will cause an alert on the NWS Android App. See https://www.wunderground.com/weather/api/d/docs?d=data/alerts That site refers to a PDF that has even more codes but formatted different! See http://www.weather.gov/os/vtec/pdfs/VTEC_explanation6.pdf so, for an example, there can be a triggers for some pretty specific stuff. And then there is the NWS NOW Android App with it pulling from a different API as referenced above.
I figured I would post this here to try and understand the genesis for the alerts, because the ability to configure which alerts to receive as triggers in ST is a big part of my hobby.