About this app
Weather Alarm for your selected Australian area.
Weather Alarm provides you with the safety of an automatic set-and-forget alert service that informs you of potential severe weather events in your selected area and gives you time to respond to them.
It runs in the background, consumes minimal resources and gives you alerts when you need them. It is completely advertisement free, has no adware/malware and is completely free of charge for personal use.
Weather Alarms is very easy to use:
1. Type a location of your interest, e.g. type “Sydney” and a drop-down list of Sydney radar locations appears on your screen. If you type “Radar” then it shows all radar locations in Australia in the drop-down list.
2. Select the rain radar of interest to you from the drop-down list, e.g. Sydney 64 km radar, Brisbane 128 km radar, Melbourne 256 km radar, etc.
3. Once the first rain radar image has loaded you can click on the radar image to select the area that you want to receive alerts for. Your selected area is shown as a black square. You can change this area as many times as you want.
-- On a 64 km radar the selected area is roughly equal to 20 km x 20 km.
-- On a 128 km radar the selected area is roughly equal to 40 km x 40 km.
-- On a 256 km radar the selected area is roughly equal to 80 km x 80 km.
-- On a 512 km radar the selected area is roughly equal to 160 km x 160km
4. Select “WIFI Only” to only use your WIFI connection for downloading of rain radar images in order to save on your mobile data plan.
5. Select “Moderate/Heavy Only” to only receive alerts about moderate/heavy rain. If you uncheck “Moderate/Heavy Only” then you will receive alerts about any type of rain (from light to heavy rain).
Weather Alarm runs silently in the background and downloads automatically the latest rain radar image (10 rain radar images per hour are provided by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology).
Examples of how to use Weather Alarm:
- Flood Prone Area Alerts: If you live in a flood prone area and want an alert if moderate/heavy rain is approaching your house or apartment.
- Flooded Roads Alerts: If you travel via potentially flooded roads due to moderate/heavy rain then select the area covering the roads of interest to you and you will automatically receive alerts if heavy rain will impact your travel.
- Tourist Rain Alert: If you visit Australia and would like alerts of any rain approaching your travel destination.
- Farmer Rain Alert: If you want to take actions when Weather Alarm detects and alerts you of rain in your area of interest.
- Animated Rain Radar: Weather Alarm shows you the last 10 downloaded rain radar images, which are downloaded automatically every six minutes (update frequency is defined by the Bureau of Meteorology).
-- Note that the advanced Android Doze function may put the Weather Alarm service to sleep for a longer period than six minutes.
-- Note, when you initially select a radar location there will be no animated rain radar since the latest rain radar image is downloaded every six minutes.
Notes:
- Weather Alarm has a built-in feature that reduces false alarms, which are caused by a rain radar image under certain conditions showing a few random rain spots (pixels) that do not correlate with actual rain.
- Each day Weather Alarm automatically downloads ~240 rain radar images from the Bureau of Meteorology in order to monitor your selected area. This would amount to ~7 MB a day and ~210 MB a month. It is recommended to keep the default “WIFI Only” if you have a limited mobile data plan.
- Weather Alarm needs access to the Network in order to download the most recent rain radar image from Bureau of Meteorology and the Storage in order to save/load your user settings and downloaded rain radar images.
