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By Ross Machurick April 9th, 2018 It’s no secret that weather affects the buying decisions of consumers. Beachgoers buy suntan lotion and ice cream during the dog days of summer on the Jersey Shore while their friends in Minnesota stock up on fashionable snow boots and scarves as November turns to December. There’s a certain seasonal rhythm to these purchasing habits – whether it be consumer goods, food or travel. For decades, advertisers have leveraged the calendar and the cyclical nature of purchasing with what I like to call “low-tech” campaigns. But today’s programmatic advertisers require more contextual data. And...

by Paul Douglas It’s definitely not your grandfather’s weather anymore. Data suggest an uptick in severe weather, worldwide – symptomatic of a warming atmosphere and warming oceans. It’s basic physics: every 2F of warming means roughly 8 percent more water vapor floating overhead; more fuel to “juice” storms and produce heavier summer rains and winter snows. The result has been a subsequent increase in billion-dollar weather events across the United States since 1980. The United States has experienced 25 separate 500-year floods since 2010, according to NOAA. During Hurricane Harvey, the town of Nederland, Texas received 64.58” of rain. By...

Oreo might be “Milk’s Favorite Cookie”, but it’s proving to be an Android developer’s least favorite update – at least in terms of the Android Oreo notifications. When the AerisWeather Android team started updating our projects for Android 8.0, it seemed like a typical day at the office. Update Gradle, set our target SDK to 26, resync, rebuild and then fix the stuff that Google broke. In fact, the first round of changes went pretty quickly. Then we noticed the notifications weren’t working on our Oreo test device… The Deception Begins One of the things that makes the Android Oreo...

Three years ago we released version 2.0 of our Aeris’ iOS Weather SDK, which was completely rewritten from the ground up with massive improvements and tons of new features. We have numerous customers using the SDK in their own awesome weather apps in the AppStore, and we even rely on it with our own app Aeris Pulse. Now, we've released the first public beta of the next major version of our iOS SDK, version 3.0! Version 3.0 expands on all of the improvements and features we outlined in part one and part two of our 2.0 preview while making a...

by Paul Douglas “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” – George Santayana Meteorologists are preoccupied with predicting some future state of the atmosphere. Too many days it’s a thankless, seemingly impossible task. To have any real success forecasting the weather it’s essential to look back in time to see what already happened, and why? Our humbling new reality: every storm is different, each weather scenario uniquely challenging. The atmosphere has never been identical to the one outside your window right now. The only way to accurately model the future is to analyze the past, with...

by Paul Douglas As a meteorologist, one of my daily responsibilities has always been to forecast the weather – both for consumers and businesses alike. When issuing a forecast, I’m free to look at the data and models and issue my own forecast: I can make a subjective prediction that differs from my competitors, or the National Weather Service (NWS). But, the NWS is the ONLY U.S. agency that issues official alerts for threatening weather conditions, in any form. If every forecaster issued their own weather alerts, the result would be chaos, widespread confusion, with a much greater risk of...

Aeris Android SDK v2.2.0 is now available! SDK v2.2.0 is a feature release providing a couple of new endpoints, some additional data fields, and a new map points layer. From the rolling rivers to the sun and moon in the sky, we’ve got data for everyone with this update! Rivers Endpoint Aeris API provides such a wide variety of information, it can be tough keeping up with the latest additions. One of the newer endpoints available is Rivers. You can use the Rivers endpoint to get access to the latest river and lakes gauge observations. Using NOAA’s Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service...

With our release of Aeris WeatherBlox, our clients are able to easily integrate weather data and maps into their websites. As users expand their integrations one common request is how to integrate the PlaceSearch view. Here’s a little guide that should get your PlaceSearch view up and running – and talking to other WeatherBlox components – in no time. Getting Started: For starters, I should mention the PlaceSearch view is only supported with the JavaScript method of integration.  However, you can integrate the JavaScript PlaceSearch view into the API version, but this exercise will focus on only using the JavaScript WeatherBlox.  This...

Back in July, you may have heard about the exciting new WeatherBlox product that we launched. Initially, we released a wide variety of views and layouts that you could easily integrate into your web applications. While we made sure to incorporate the most commonly used weather details into our initial release, we’ve decided to give you more options by expanding our WeatherBlox layouts. Hourly Forecast Layout The HourlyForecast layout allows you to easily integrate the hourly forecast into a full page for your users. By default, this layout will show you the remaining hours for today at the viewed location....

The Aeris Maps Platform (AMP) continues to grow as a leading service for weather maps by offering a wide variety of visualization tools to help tell the weather story.  Over the past few weeks, we have made many additions, including jet stream, Canadian weather alerts, and lightning strike layers. We continue this trend with the latest release of several new radar improvements and additions to Aeris Weather Maps. Australian Radar Since radar is one of the most popular layers within AMP, its usage continues to grow since we extended coverage to include Canada and South Korea earlier this year. As of this week, radar coverage...