I saw this afternoon that there has been an update to the IOS app for National Weather Service alerts. The details of the update doesn’t really get into specifics other than “you will now see that information (watches, warnings, etc.) on the main forecast screen.” Is there a push alert to the notification section for IOS? And if so, is the notification sound the same as the default sound for rain and lightening? I haven’t been able to find any info on this. And obviously, without a weather service alert in my area, I’m not able to test on my own.
Push notifications will be coming in another update. Right now you will see the warnings on your main forecast if there are any alerts for that location:
Tapping on that will show a list if there is more than one alert:
Tapping on an alert will bring up the details from NWS and a map with the affected area:
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I’ve noticed this for the past several days for my Tempest stations and the additional locations I have my App set up for.
Thank you for the response. I look forward to that next update containing the notifications.
Push notifications will be coming in another update.
Sounds cool but please allow us to disable those (and retain other push notifications like rainfall start, lightning, etc.)!
I wish your team luck. In my experience, the NWS alerts XML feed management is a total mess, but maybe you’re able to clean it up a bit with some ML effort?
Do you have plans to add the Bureau of Meteorology (bom.gov.au) weather warnings to your app? Would be nice to have the Australian ones in there too!
I saw a NWS statement this morning on my landing page. It worked great.
Question: is there a way to add a notification to the widgets and lock screen? I know there isn’t a lot of space there for the actual statement itself, but an indicator like an asterisk, color change, star or something would be helpful in letting us know there has been a statement without having to go into the app and find it. AccuWeather does this in their app for their widgets and it is very helpful.
@KCSam Yeah this is something I would like to add and will try and get it into a build. It will likely just be a simple little indicator like you suggested since there isn’t a lot of space to work with.
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Thank you for the response, Corey. That sounds great. Have a great rest of your day.
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An icon indicator sounds good, but deciding what’s important enought to highlight that way might be a challenge – coastal flood warnings and small craft advisories don’t matter much to landlubbers on high ground, the frost advisory I saw the other day meant little to me since I have no crops… etc.
@peter4 They are specific to your locations lat/lon. So if you are inland you shouldn’t get coastal flood warnings unless that location falls into the NWS alert area.
For now we display any and all alerts that your station or location falls into.
As for the indicator, this is what I’m planning on:
The only issue I foresee is that widgets update when iOS decides. So it’s possible you see a warning and there isn’t one in the app or there isn’t one on the widget and there is one in the app. Opening the app from the widget forces a refresh and should sync everything. This also should be solved with the addition of push notifications which allows a force reload of widgets without impacting the “budget” Apple imposes on us. Just something to keep in mind until those are added.
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That indicator was exactly what I was envisioning. That would be great.
As for the issue you mentioned with the widgets for IOS, I always access the app either via the screen lock widget or my home screen widget. So luckily for me, that refresh issue shouldn’t be a problem.
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They are specific to your locations lat/lon. So if you are inland you shouldn’t get coastal flood warnings unless that location falls into the NWS alert area.
@cmorello, understood, but even considering just geographic relevance, that’s a huge “unless”.
For instance, around here coastal flood impacts real estate on a few blocks closest to the river – some property owners need to put out sandbags. Anyone just 150 meters from the coast is OK yet NWS alert boundaries tend to stretch dozens of kilometers from the actual flood zone. From what I can tell (reinforced by the excellent IEM archive of NWS alerts), NWS tends to apply warnings to predefined zones that touch the affected coasts. But theses zones are generally tied to political county boundaries --not topography-- and stretch far from the coastline.
That’s just geographic relevance. There’s also impact relevance – e.g., I don’t personally care about Small Craft Advisories or Special Marine Warnings or some of the many other alert types (here’s the current list) because they almost never impact me.
Thanks for sharing the widget screenshot. One small suggestion – try to include alert text. The other day i saw an alert line in the Tempest app home screen and was pleased to see the alert type, Frost Advisory, listed right away, no tapping needed. It looks like you have some space there that you could use. IIRC my local TV station’s white-labeled weather forecast app does something similar, like showing one alert type string, adding something like “+ 2” to indicate how many titles are not shown when there’s more than one. I don’t know if they rank the alerts by modification time, publish time, severity, or what, but I think you’d definitely want to try to prioritize use of that screen space. (Duh. I don’t need to tell you this, it’s clear your UI folks are pretty good at their jobs,)
Bummer about the widget refresh timing – sounds like the background URL fetch APIs I’ve used in iOS. I would have expected that a push notification could trigger a widget update – no?
Best wishes,
Peter
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When will these alerts work in the Cape Verde Islands??? 
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