A saved place is a location on your account. A rule decides which alerts covering it reach you, and on which channel.
There is no radius to set. An alert covers a place when the polygon the National Weather Service drew contains it, which is the same test the live map uses and the same one the forecast office intended.
Adding a place
- Sign in and open Places on your account page.
- Search for a city, county or ZIP. Places come from the site’s own gazetteer rather than typed coordinates, so the hit carries a real position and a name you will recognise a year from now.
- Choose what the place is worth telling you about. Warnings are ticked and the rest are not, which is the honest default: a warning means act now, and an advisory at 2 AM costs you your belief that a message from us matters.
- Attach the channels that should hear about it.
How many places you can save, and how many people each one can notify, is what a plan buys. See pricing.
What a rule can watch
Rules match on the alert, not on the weather. Two axes:
- Significance, the VTEC letter: warnings, watches, advisories, statements. This is the axis the NWS asks people to read, and the one the map colours by.
- Hazard: tornado, severe thunderstorm, flash flood, hurricane, storm surge, blizzard, ice storm, high wind, excessive heat, fire weather and the rest of the VTEC phenomenon codes.
Both are needed because significance alone cannot separate a tornado warning from a severe thunderstorm warning: both are significance W and differ only by hazard code.
A place carries one list of significances, which every channel on it inherits. Any channel can then override it with a rule of its own. That is what lets a single place call your phone for a tornado warning, text you for a thunderstorm, and do nothing louder than a push notification for an advisory.
Leaving the hazard list empty means every hazard. An allow-list only ever exists because somebody typed one, so a hazard nobody thought to list still arrives rather than going quietly undelivered.
Channels
| Channel | Available on | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Push | Every plan | The mobile apps, on the devices signed in to your account |
| Every plan | Any address you add and confirm | |
| Webhook | Every plan | A signed POST to a public HTTPS address you control |
| Text message | Paid plans | Carrier messages cost real money per message, hence the plan |
| Phone call | Paid plans, or a $14.99/year add-on on Free | Warnings only, never an advisory |
Running out of a text allowance does not stop the alert. Push, email, webhooks and calls carry on, free.
Reaching more than one person
A place can notify several people. Group somebody’s number and address under their name and they count once against your plan’s limit, rather than once per way of reaching them.