When weather is a factor in your daily operations, you probably either use a dashboard to query for weather information or call an API to get your data stream. Many weather services or weather APIs provide the information requested and leave you to take it from there. Tomorrow.io’s approach is different; we are geared towards the individual client’s operational efficiency and we care about which actions need to be taken as a result of weather. That’s why we prioritized MicroWeather Alerts early on.
It’s one thing to proactively go to a service or tap into an API and see what’s going on at your location of interest. It’s a completely different thing to ask the system to let you know what’s going on as soon as something you care about happens. If you’re monitoring more than one location, care about more than one type of weather event, and need to know about it proactively in order to take action, there needs to be an automated way to learn the short-term forecast and to share that information with your teams.
That’s where our Alerts come in, among other operational functionalities. Our Alerts service flips the API concept on its head. Instead of calling the MicroWeather API or checking our HyperCast Dashboard every single time, you set an Alert once by geo-location, weather parameters, and thresholds relevant to your business. When your criteria are met, you can get an Alert in three different ways (pick one, pick ‘em all): directly on the system (Webhook if API, screen if using HyperCast), Email, and SMS text message. We can also send the alerts to custom groups of people or any individual, without the need of these individuals to ‘sign up’. For example, if you have multiple outdoor work sites, you can maximize their productive time before significant weather hits any of them, and at the same time, keeping your crews safe. If you’re in agriculture and you have many (or large) fields to monitor, your Alerts can tell you what part of which field is about to experience weather phenomena, and communicate that to different teams.
Other providers do not have such capabilities. At most they will alert you of general weather phenomena such as the government-level NWS Alerts or Advisories, but none allow alerts to be customized and tailored to your needs, and communicated in multiple ways to anyone who needs it.
If certain conditions (complex or simple) are important to you, our Alerts save you the programming hassle. If you have many locations of interest (or hyperlocal sampling within large locations), Alerts mean fewer calls to make to the API and less interpretation churn on your side. If you need to convey different info to different groups of people to take action, Alerts will save you the logic, vendor integration, and system maintenance. Instead of “here’s the weather in the general area, good luck,” we say our customers deserve a turn key service where they don’t have to build a whole system to analyze and translate the weather. No matter what you choose to do with the API, MicroWeather Alerts makes it simpler, efficient and proactive for your business.
