Blog

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...

The sunrise marks the beginning of a brand new day. The ever-changing nature of weather means each new day brings with it the need for a new forecast. Whether you’re deciding what to wear for your morning run or wondering what the skies will be like as you photograph the sunrise, the weather is important. Our Aeris Weather API can provide the tools needed to find the sunrise forecast. This article will provide an example of how to use the Aeris Weather API endpoints to find the sunrise forecast. Sunmoon Endpoint Our sunmoon endpoint provides a potpourri of information about...

One of the most common concerns we encounter is how to protect your Aeris API credentials. While it can be difficult to have API credentials that are completely secure, we do provide tools to help assist with many threats. One of those tools is the namespace feature that we have built into the member’s area ready for you to use today. Locating Your API Credentials / Namespace Options Let’s start by logging into your account from the home page. Next, click on the Apps tab where you will have all the tools necessary for managing your applications. Here you will be...

Previously in our severe weather series, we’ve discussed severe weather outlooks and storm cells. This article will continue the series by concentrating on the weather alerts datasets available with the Aeris API and the Aeris Maps Platform.  This information is perfect for integration into mobile and notification platforms, allowing you to notify users quickly when severe weather events may be nearing. These advisories datasets provides access to all currently active US advisories as issued by the National Weather Service (NWS). The NWS issues a variety of severe weather warnings, watches, advisories and statements that may be issued for individual or multiple forecast zones or...