WxNotify News

I was able to get some time to fix a disabled alerts bug and introduce a small feature related to the Convective Outlook alerts:

• Disabled Alert notification emails were only listing alert UUIDs and not the actual alert information. Not very useful, right? That has now been fixed to show which alerts are disabled.
• The Convective Outlook Alert feature got a small enhancement to allow users to specify which locations should be considered when alerting for Convective Outlook alerts. Prior to that, all user locations were checked. Users might use this if they have a location that they may want to keep defined but not always be notified for. (e.g. typical vacation location)

The combination of some DigitalOcean planned maintenance & a recent database configuration change by me triggered a brief outage of WxNotify this morning. The maintenance caused the database server to reboot, and because of the recent database configuration change on the server, the database failed to start back up. That, of course caused the rest of the website to stop functioning which means WxNotify users did not receive any notifications between 2am-7am. I resolved the issue around 7am this morning, so notifications should now be working as usual. The configuration change that caused the outage was a one-off modification, so this will not be a problem going forward. Many apologies for the interruption of service!

In order to keep up with current news around the NOAA Weather Wire Service, EMWIN, NOAAPort, and NOAA/NWS in general, I started following the Weather Message (a.k.a WxMessage) mailing list several years ago. It’s been a wealth of information and the members are always friendly and kind to newcomers. Due to the frustration by many of the members over recent NOAA Weather Wire outages, several WxMessage list members, (including Danny Lloyd, the owner of WxMessage) was kind enough to start sharing NWS product data using their satellite systems over the Internet. This new data source shares data in the same manner as the previously-retired EMWIN Byteblaster network. These servers provide a non-stop 24×7 feed of NWS products, including satellite graphics.

This was very exciting news to hear. Having the availability of EMWIN Byteblaster as a backup to NOAA Weather Wire will be hugely beneficial, especially during times of severe weather. Since there are EMWIN Byteblaster servers available again, I am planning on incorporating this into WxNotify. EMWIN products are also available by FTP, but there is a 2-3 minute delay between updates.

Currently, WxNotify uses NOAA Weather Wire as its primary data source, with EMWIN FTP as the back up. I plan to use the open source client npemwin from the retired noaaport.net website to replace the EMWIN FTP data source as a secondary option. I’ll then keep EMWIN FTP as a tertiary fall-back option in the case of NOAA Weather Wire and EMWIN Byteblaster goes down.

Will post another update once these changes are integrated.

I’ve now added the option to send text-only e-mails. This will apply to all e-mails coming from WxNotify. (weather alerts, daily forecasts, monthly tests, etc.)

You can turn this on by signing into your account at https://www.wxnotify.com/login/, clicking on profile menu in upper right and selecting “Settings”. The first option is now “Send emails in HTML format. (sends plain text emails if set to ‘No’)”, which is set to ‘Yes’ by default. To change, just move the slider to “No” and apply the settings.

A subscriber requested that I bring back the option to send text-only e-mail alerts. I had mistakenly removed the option (only providing HTML emails) without realizing that subscribers actually wanted that feature! I will be working on adding that feature back in over the weekend.

I was notified by my monitoring that the Chicago NWS office issued a Winter Storm Watch for its CWA around 2:47pm today, but it was not dispatched by WxNotify. It turns out the product got stuck in Laravel’s queue for some reason. I re-ran the product through the system and it was dispatched with no errors. I will do some further investigation why this happened.

I have now fixed an issue where some subscribers were not receiving daily forecasts. WxNotify obtains daily forecast data from the National Weather Service API, and for some users, the API was returning empty current condition data for the user’s closest reporting station. The code now looks at the 10 closest weather stations and loops through each one (sorted in ascending order by distance) and returns the first one that returns data.

I received reports of users receiving duplicate alerts. The reason was WxNotify showed EMWIN being the primary product source, however the NWWS-OI process was also running. Will add additional monitoring so I’ll know if something like this happens again.

Apologies for the inconvenience!

Found an issue today that had the URL https://www.wxnotify.com/grlevelx/sels throwing a 500 error. Found that my product filtering regular expression wasn’t quite right, so I wasn’t downloading the SAW products. This resulted in the code that determines SEL coordinates to return an empty string, which made the above URL error out.

I’m deploying a fix now.

I was alerted to the fact that subscribers using AT&T who have SMS contacts set up are not receiving SMS text messages. I dug deeper into this issue and found that the messages to <number>@txt.att.net are bouncing when sent from my server. Some research on the Internet resulting in several posts on AT&T forums with others complaining of the same issue. Some posts date back to 2018! Apparently AT&T severely rate limits messages sent through this service and delays delivery or in my case refuses to relay the messages at all.

Of course, none of this works very well for sending time-sensitive weather alerts. Unfortunately I am unable to revert back to the previous behavior of sending SMS text messages. My suggestion is for those users who wish to continue receiving WxNotify alerts use a different & more reliable contact method, such as the new options Discord, Pushover, Slack, or Telegram. Please refer this[1] article for setting up contacts.

Apologies for the inconvenience!

1. https://wxnotify.tawk.help/article/contacts