Blog

We recently released version 1.7.5 of the Aeris Weather API to production which offers several new features, improvements and bug fixes. In this article we’ll highlight the more significant changes, but review the Aeris API release history for the complete list of updates. New Rivers Endpoints The recent hurricanes, Harvey, Irma, and Maria, have caused significant flooding in the continental US and Puerto Rico. With the new rivers endpoint, the Aeris Weather API provides access to river and lake gauge information managed by the Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS). The gauge observations include information on the gauge location, current water level...

The latest release of our Aeris Android SDK is now available! SDK v2.1.0 focuses on improved usability and stability, while also adding a few new goodies to the Aeris Android development camp. Read on for a rundown of the changes… Support for Bleeding Edge AMP Layers The Aeris Maps Platform (AMP) team has a pretty cool gig. After all, what weather geek wouldn’t love generating exciting visual representations of the conditions all around us every day!? They do a great job, and their enthusiasm for their craft sometimes causes them to pump out new map layers faster than us SDK...

Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 storm, is currently approaching the Texas coast this afternoon with landfall expected sometime tonight. Along with hurricane force winds and gusts up to 130 mph near the center, very heavy rainfall is expected across much of southeast Texas as Harvey is expected to stall and meander slowly along the coast over the next 7-9 days. With rainfall totals over the next week forecast up to 10-20″ across the entire region, reaching 30-40″ in a few smaller regions, catastrophic flooding can be expected. The Aeris Weather Maps platform is a great tool for providing the latest weather information...

The Aeris Maps Platform (AMP) is a powerful tool allowing you to integrate weather imagery in a variety of methods, whether stand-alone static imagery, to animations, or to fully interactive weather maps. Over the past few weeks, we have continued improving and expanding our weather maps platform. One area of concentration has been with AMP’s speed and efficiency, especially for large image requests. We have seen considerable improvements from the most recent updates, with significant speed improvements and continued low error rates. We also continue to improve upon existing layers, including the recent addition of Canadian alerts, as well as releasing new layer offerings, such as lightning strikes....

We have released version 1.7.3 of the Aeris Weather API to production that builds upon the recent Canadian weather alert additions and improved advisory support. We will highlight a few of these changes, though for the complete list of updates review the Aeris API release history.

Weather plays a critical role in our lives and economy. To help inform on upcoming weather events, the National Weather Service (NWS) issues warnings, watches, and advisories. These alerts are available via the Aeris Weather API using the advisories endpoint and within the Aeris Maps Platform (AMP) utilizing the alerts layers. In Canada, Environment Canada (EC) issues similar alerts, and today we are announcing that Canadian weather alerts are now available within the Aeris Weather API and AMP.  Best of all, Canadian alerts are available to all API and AMP users with no additional development required! Canadian Weather Alerts in the Aeris Weather API For the Aeris...

We recently took the plunge into using Kubernetes to orchestrate containers for a number of our web and data-ingest services. While we have been generally pleased with the experience, we have found metrics, monitoring, and logging to be major pain points for us. Kubernetes provides no out-of-the-box system for centralized logging, so we had resorted to scanning log files on individual pods with a lot of guess-and-check work in matching server logs to application behavior. Without any human-readable interface for viewing application metrics, it was really hard to construct a story describing why an application behaved the way it did. It was clear...

Lightning strikes are a common occurrence this time of year, leading to injuries and damage within the US and globally.  Our Aeris Maps Platform (AMP) offers a lightning strike density layer, which highlights clusters of frequent lightning activity. While visualizing clusters and density is useful for getting a sense of general lightning activity, many users have requested the ability to plot individual strikes. With our new Lightning Strikes layer in AMP, now you can! As a value-added reseller of Earth Networks Total Lightning Network, we are announcing two new lightning strike layers within AMP. These new layers display lighting strikes over the...

We recently released WeatherBlox, an exciting new service that allows you to quickly add highly-customizable weather content to your web applications and sites. WeatherBlox is a library of weather views for the web that can be used individually for small sections of specific weather content or combined into larger layouts for full-page weather content custom to your application’s unique requirements. These views are fully responsive as well, meaning they are really flexible to ensure they fit within any context they’re added into. And since they’re designed for the web, customizing the design of your WeatherBlox views is painless by overriding...

Today we released version 1.7.0 of the Aeris Weather API to production. This update provides several new features, improvements and bug fixes. Check out the version history for the complete list of changes. Lightning Add-on With 1.7.0, the API supports our new Aeris Lightning API add-on. This addition provides the ability to obtain information on lightning strikes from the past 5 minutes and within a 25 mile radius of a specified location. Both cloud-to-ground strikes and intra-cloud pulse information is available. Review the lightning endpoint documentation for more information, and contact us for a trial of the Lightning add-on or...