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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 point and a radius. A rule decides what happens when something crosses it.

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.

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.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 neighbours, 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.