Severe Weather Alerts

I am personally glad you are asking. I find this a bit more important than what color hue my new light bulb should be.

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And for everyone that still uses WU until it goes away there is a good website that gives an example on how to make persistent notifications in HA.

If you haven’t seen it here it is:

I’ve made a few modifications to it to better work for my specific use. If you’re interested I can post the code but It’s mostly based on his work from the link above.

I’ve got a working pushbullet notification and a persistent notification on every page of the front end along with a (likely…) working announcement from my Echo dots. The dot announcement I just came up with recently and have only tested it with a simulated message that I created to test the search feature I implemented to only announce the real severe stuff instead of “it’s foggy outside” in the middle of the night. :smile:

And the announcement idea was the first thing of home automation that finally got my wife to say “wow, that’s a really good idea!”.

@Dixey @finity For what it’s worht: if you happen to live in Europe, you can try to use https://www.meteoalarm.eu/, which is where WU gets his European data from.
That in combination with https://github.com/waynedgrant/meteo-alarm-weather-warnings could be a hit I think.

I certainly am going to check this out…

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Thanks for the info! Unfortunately, it won’t help us since I’m in Indiana and Dixey is in Texas. But I’m sure it will be of great use to others.

I’ve been looking at the NWS api and it’s nothing like the WU underground so there isn’t much to be salvaged. How exactly do you use this? Are you using it with the AD Dashboard, or just to put a persistent notification on the HA page? One thing that was sort of in the old one was the ability to have it send the alert to a speaker. I have a app that lets me send messages to my Alexa’s. I’m going to add this to it, but if you don’t need it I won’t add it into version 1. Thanks

I have been using, and found extremely stable, the Alexa TTS addon from:

if you are taking requests. :slight_smile:

yea that’s what I’m using. I have it setup as a separate app under appdaemon so I can just trigger a SPEACH_EVENT, pass it the alexa device I want it to go to, and the message. it seems to work for the limited testing I have done with it for home.

and a little chat with the author last night showed me an easy way to set up so an emergency broadcast can be simultaneously sent to every echo in the house. (just put all your echos in a group and call on the group).

I only use it to get the special weather statements from NWS (via WU). I don’t use the component itself for notifications ( i didn’t know that it could do that). I use the alert function from WU then use the (modified) code from the link above to do the notification part.

I don’t use appdaemon. Everything is done in HA.

And lastly, I am also using the Alexa TTS function by @keatontaylor for the general warning announcement.

As long as I can get a (hopefully) similarly formatted sensor from the NWS then I should (hopefully) be able to work with it from there.

Thanks again.

This is the code that I’m using to trigger an alexa announcement based on the WU alert:

automation:
  - alias: Weather Alert Announcement
    trigger:
      platform: state
      entity_id: sensor.pws_alerts
    condition:
      condition: and
      conditions:
        - condition: template
          value_template: '{{states.sensor.pws_alerts.state | int > 0}}'
          ## Added a time condition because I don't want a non-emergency alert waking me up
        - condition: or
          conditions:
            - condition: time
              after: '09:00:00'
              before: '23:00:00'
            - condition: template
              value_template: >
                {{ 'Warning' in states.sensor.pws_alerts.attributes.Description }}
    action:
      - service: media_player.alexa_tts
        data:
          entity_id: 
            - media_player.computer_room_dot
            - media_player.kitchen_dot
            - media_player.livingroom_dot
            - media_player.master_bedroom_dot
          message: "Warning! Warning! The National Weather Service has issued a 
        {{ states.sensor.pws_alerts.attributes.Description }} for your area. 
        It expires at {{ states.sensor.pws_alerts.attributes.Expires }}."

I could have used a group for the dots but that would be just one more thing to set up that wasn’t really necessary.

Captured and archived for future stitching. Thank you.

finity,
This is where Tinkerer’s comment about multiple posts causing people to waste time comes in. One of your other posts the other day (US) National Weather Service Weather Alerts was related to an AppDaemon app I had written to send a persistent notification to HA, the Appdaemon Dashboard, and to a local speaker when a alert came up. I had said in an earlier post on that thread (like a year ago) that I would look into moving it to NWS. Your message about WU going away prompted me to go ahead and start looking into it like I said I would. I have now spent about a day re-writing that code to use NWS only to find that you aren’t using it at all. This is where the comment about wasting people’s time comes in.
There is no way you could have know this when you posted it. This is just an example of why shotgunning posts isn’t the best solution.
As it is, I am close to having my app re-written for NWS so I’ll update it on git hub and leave it for anyone that wants to use it for the AD Dashboard.

Yeah, I’m sorry but I don’t see anything at all in the other thread about it being related to using AppDaemon. You may have been thinking of that when you posted but you didn’t explicitly say the “the one I just did one for WeatherUnderground” was an AD app. I assumed it was referencing some custom component that you had done for WU because I think that was what cgarwood was asking for in his feature request in the OP. His OP also doesn’t say anything about AD. It was a specific request for a component based on the NWS RSS Alert system.

Specifically, “This would be useful for US users as you can get faster updates than you can get with the Weather Underground alerts.”

Then you replied that you had done one for WU and you could look into doing one for NWS.

I only simply asked if you had gotten anywhere with it. Assuming “it” was a custom component.

There are literally three posts in that entire thread.

If I missed something obvious to tell me that you were both talking about AD then I honestly apologize. But as of now I don’t see it.

And that miscommunication could have happened whether I posted there, here or somewhere else.

And FWIW, there’s nothing above in this thread that implies anything about me using AD either aside from the one post by cgarwood that I never felt I needed to respond to since i don’t use AD.

I’ll admit that maybe adding the new thread about this might have been a misjudgment on my part (which is why I volunteered to delete it) but I had good intentions. As posted above I thought no one would see a 5 month old thread so posting a new one would be prudent. I still don’t see it as “shotgunning” posts tho. Every post had a specific intention that were different but admittedly similar.

Again, sorry if I wasted any body’s time.

No problem. It made me get off my backside and switch my app over to NWS.

I know your intentions were good. I’m not saying they were not.

Have a good day

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Thanks, again.

Once you get the code switched over make sure you post a link, please. I’m not against using AD. I’ve just never used it before. But if it’s the only way to move forward on this topic I may breakdown and learn it. :wink:

And from the responses I’ve gotten here and on my other new thread (zero replies so far…) it looks like that may be the only option.

Looking at the DarkSky API I see you can request “Alerts” https://darksky.net/dev/docs#/dev/docs#api-request-types . I noticed in the HA darksky sensor addon darksky.py https://github.com/home-assistant/home-assistant/blob/master/homeassistant/components/sensor/darksky.py “Alerts” are not addressed yet nearest_storm_ distance and nearest_storm_bearing can be requested, are functional, but not mentioned in the addon documentation.
Yes, there is a storm 23 miles to the NW of us right now.

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I just finally had as chance to test the alexa TTS part of that automation I posted above (severe thunderstorm warning only luckily) and It didn’t work exactly as I expected.

When I put the message in a template it rendered perfectly but in the automation it read everything out word for word including the states.sensor… part.

I forgot I needed it to be a data_template to render the speech correctly. So you need to change the action: section to the following:

  action:
    - service: media_player.alexa_tts
      data_template:
        entity_id: 
          - media_player.computer_room_dot
          - media_player.kitchen_dot
          - media_player.livingroom_dot
          - media_player.master_bedroom_dot
        message: "Warning! Warning! The National Weather Service has issued a 
        {{ states.sensor.pws_alerts.attributes.Description }} for your area. 
        It expires at {{ states.sensor.pws_alerts.attributes.Expires }}."

Now it renders the speech exactly right.

My wife thought it was funny when Alexa started talking and said “dot” every other word! :smile:

I just posted a new topic with a working set up that allows for notifications to replace the WU component.

You can find it here:

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And I created one for Europe, based on meteoalarm.eu website. I used RodeNed to capture all the data from the website and publish over MQTT to HASS.

You can find it here:

I use a sensor for severe weather alerts from the national weather service. I have stopped using Weather Underground almost entirely. I have switch to darksky for everything except my current radar image and loop (looking for a replacement for these)

sensor:

  • platform: weatheralerts
    sameid: !secret nws_sameid

I have been waiting for some severe weather so an alert goes off, and will draft an automation in Node-Red. Since the content may vary for what I would be looking for (i am particularly interested in high wind alerts), but someone else might want to key in on other values.
Node-Red would be good at parsing and directing the automation based on the information.

Hope this helps. I would also be interested to see what anyone else is doing for this and replacing wunderground.