Community-written

Documentation

Set up alerts for the places you care about, wire WxAlerts into whatever you already run, and read straight from the alert and lightning feeds. Spotted something wrong or missing on a page? Tell us in Discord and it gets fixed.

Getting started

Start hereWhat WxAlerts sends you, where it gets it, and the fastest way to get a warning on your own phone.Saved places and alert rulesA saved place is a location you picked from the gazetteer. A rule decides which alerts over it reach which of your channels.

How it works

How an alert reaches youThree independent feeds out of the National Weather Service, one deduplicated pipeline, and a broker that pushes the warning to you about forty seconds after the office issued it.

Storm analysis

What WXA/SA isStorm analysis - every convective cell in the country tracked, scored and projected forward every two minutes, with the rotation inside it tracked as its own object.Reading the mapTurning the storm cells layer on, and what the cell, the two lines and the two cones each mean once it is.NotificationsThe episode model - one weather event as one person experiences it - and how many times a single storm is allowed to wake you.Level II radarThe whole volume scan rather than a flattened picture of it - what Level II carries, why the web never draws it, and the debris badge it is the only path to.

Storm analysis · under the hood

DetectionWhere a storm object comes from, what its four hazard readings mean, and what each notification band is worth.TrackingHow a storm keeps one identity across merges and splits, how its motion is measured, why it only alerts once, and how the cone ahead of it is built.Rotation detectionVelocity couplets tracked as objects in their own right - how they are found, what has to be true before one can alert, and what a located rotation adds that a storm cell cannot.AccuracyHow early the alerts are, what they claim, where the system cannot see, and what happens when the feed falls behind.

Spotter reports

Spotter reportsGround truth from people who were there - how a report is filed, how it is scored, and where it goes.The spotter placefileGround-truth spotter reports in GRLevel3, GR2Analyst and GREarth. One URL, no account, refreshes itself every two minutes.

Weather stations

Why put a station on CWOPA backyard weather station that reports to CWOP lands in NOAA's MADIS, in front of forecasters, and in the analysis models, closing the 50 km gap between airports down to a few km.Getting an IDRegister for a free CWOP ID, understand the three different identifiers the program will issue you, and get the passcode question right the first time.The APRS weather packetThe wire format field by field, covering data type identifiers, the fixed-width weather fields, timestamps, the APRS-IS login handshake, and worked examples you can decode by hand.From a station you already ownThe fast path, with a Davis, Ecowitt or Ambient station, a Raspberry Pi running WeeWX or CumulusMX, and you are on CWOP in an afternoon.One-command SDR to APRS installerTurn a Raspberry Pi and a $30 RTL-SDR dongle into an APRS-IS weather beacon for the 433 MHz station already in your yard. One command, a few questions, and your callsign is on aprs.fi.On the air with RF APRSFor licensed hams, covering how to beacon weather on 144.390 MHz with Direwolf or a hardware TNC, plus antennas, grounding, duty cycle and a solar power budget.Building one from scratchSensor selection, the firmware details that decide whether your data is any good, pressure reduction, parts lists by budget, and the siting standards to document honestly.AS3935 lightning detectionConfiguring, calibrating and interfacing the Franklin lightning sensor, covering what it can honestly tell you, how to get the data off a station when APRS has no field for it, and where the safety line sits.Install, commission and maintainMounting and grounding, orienting and calibrating, the validation tools that tell you whether your data is trusted, the MADIS QC flags, and the maintenance that keeps a station honest for years.Your station on WxAlertsWhat happens to your observations once they reach us, and how CWOP data is positioned, weighted against ASOS, checked against its neighbors, and where to find your own station on the site.

Home Assistant

Home AssistantLive NWS alerts and GOES GLM lightning pushed into Home Assistant over MQTT, mapped onto the zones you already have.Entities and attributesWhat each entity holds, the attributes worth templating against, and why alerts are grouped by county while lightning is grouped by zone.Events and automationsThe wxalerts_alert event, why it beats a state trigger for warnings, and automations and cards that use it.How it connectsOne MQTT connection, retained alerts, tombstones instead of expiry math, and the subscription budget you are spending.Limits and troubleshootingWhat the integration deliberately will not do, and the handful of things that actually go wrong.

MeshMonitor

MeshMonitorBridge NWS watches and warnings onto a Meshtastic or MeshCore mesh through a MeshMonitor instance you already run.Configuration referenceEvery key in wxalerts.yml, covering counties, delivery limits, the rule language, and the message templates.What it decides to sendThe decision path for one alert, why repeats are suppressed, and how the airtime budget rations an outbreak.Monitoring and troubleshootingThe health and metrics endpoints, the two signals worth alerting on, and what to check when an alert never arrives.

API

MQTT alerts feedLive NWS hazards over MQTT-on-WebSocket, retained per hazard, tombstoned when they end, and filed by both issuing office and SAME code.MQTT lightning feedLive GLM flashes over MQTT-on-WebSocket, with a geohash topic tree that doubles as the spatial index.REST APIActive alerts, warning polygons and location search over plain HTTP JSON.Weather APIMeasured conditions from the nearest station plus a seven-day forecast, in one small response built for a screen.