Blog

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...

Aeris Android SDK v2.1.1 is now available. SDK v2.1.1 updates dependencies and provides several minor bug fixes. We will highlight some of these changes, through review the release history for the complete list. Wildfire Incident Management Teams Within the AerisWeather Fires endpoint, there is a little data field named imtType. This field tells us which type of Incident Management Team is dealing with each wildfire. With a typical wildfire (if there is such a thing), the imtType field is often unused. The API will return null for an unknown imtType. But as wildfires grow in size and intensity, the management efforts...

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....