Severe Weather Alerts

About Severe Weather Alerts

Free and open-source app that informs you of various weather hazards, courtesy of the National Weather Service.

Nowadays, weather apps are bloat! They are resource and battery hogs, have poor performance, and are bundled with trackers and ads. This app is trying to fix that. Introducing a lightweight weather warning tool. To be clear, this isn't your typical weather app. In most cases, it is nothing more than a blank screen, that is until some weather is expected in your area. At that point, the app reliably sends push notifications and provides detailed information on the most up to date forecast. It's not going to tell you Thursday's probability of precipitation, but it is going to tell you should prepare for a hail storm and park your car in the garage. The simplicity allows for it to be modular and pair well with other apps. Many beautiful lightweight apps just lack severe weather alerts. Or maybe you're someone who doesn't care much for weather, you keep an umbrella in your car, and just want to know when there's going to be a snowstorm. I got you covered as well. Both the frontend and backend are free (as in freedom and cost), open-source, and there's no ads or in-app purchases.

What this app tells you about:
Tornados, Tsunamis, Strong winds, Strong and severe thunderstorms, Flooding, Fire Weather, Hurricanes, Typhoons, Tropical storms, Storm Surge, Blizzards, Winter storms, Ice storms, Boating and swimming hazards, Snow squalls, Avalanches, Earthquakes, Volcanoes, Poor air quality, Dust storms, Excessive heat, Extreme cold, Warm-season freezes and frost, Dense fog, Dense smoke, etc.

TLDR; The weather that matters, poses a threat to life or property, and won't be cringe if you mention it in small talk.

What this app doesn't tell you about:
Probability of precipitation, high and low temperatures, dew point, visibility, pressure, etc. Unless of course these parameters are relevant to expected hazardous weather.

Features:
- Simple. Less is more here.
- Shows a history of previous versions. Pretty useful to see how the severity and confidence of an alert are trending with time. Especially useful if you are responsible for making weather-related decisions. Can also help differentiate updates that don't appear to have any changes.
- Different alerts are color-coded and have icons in the notification tray to help communicate the type of alert at a glance.
- Notifications utilize the given space to show the alert name and as many details as possible.
- Text is parsed to pretty things up and remove hard line wraps.
- Expired alerts show in the app for a while. Useful if an alert is brief or you slept through it. Also, information about the end of a hazard is often put out near or completely after an alert expires. You would never see this otherwise.
- Graphics! Alerts are commonly put out for large areas and constrained by county and geographical borders. Everyone in the area gets the same message. This app overlays that area over official forecast maps from the same people who sent it. This feature helps personalize the forecast. The graphics are dynamically generated based on the alert type, time, and wording. This lets you know if you have time to bring the umbrella in or if you should be in your basement. It lets you know if you're in the center of the snow swath or completely outside of it because your county has a panhandle shape.
- Alerts are sent by your location, not your town, not your county. Can't believe this is a feature but if you have an app that's constantly spamming you with alerts, they might not even be for you.
- Small. The download size is only a few megabytes.
- Information is from talented meteorologists from your local National Weather Service office that understand the climatology in your area. Not from random model runs that radically change every hour.
- Links to local weather office
- More in the works!

Contribute to the source code:
https://github.com/qconrad/severe-weather-alerts