Notifications
Warnings, watches, rain on the way and lightning nearby, for the places you have saved. Choose what each place tells you, set quiet hours, and turn it off here at any time. No account.
What each notice is
- Warnings
- Every National Weather Service warning in force at the place: tornado, severe thunderstorm, flash flood, winter storm, high wind, excessive heat and the rest. A storm-based warning is matched to its polygon, so a warning for the far corner of your county does not reach you. Checked every minute.
- Watches
- Conditions are right for the hazard to develop: tornado, severe thunderstorm, flood, winter storm. Matched by the county and forecast zone the place is in.
- Advisories
- Advisories and statements: wind, frost, dense fog, heat, special weather statements. Off by default, because there are many of them.
- Rain starting
- Rain reaching the place within the hour while it is dry there now, from the same radar extrapolation as the forecast page's next 90 minutes. Checked every five minutes, at most one notice every three hours per place. It moves the rain that is on radar now; it cannot see a shower that has not formed yet.
- Lightning
- A flash within 5, 10, 15 or 25 miles, seen by the Geostationary Lightning Mapper on GOES-19, checked every two minutes. After a notice, the next one comes only once 30 minutes have passed without a flash in range. The mapper sees cloud flashes as well as ground strikes.
Where it works
Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera on Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, and Safari on a Mac. On iPhone and iPad (iOS 16.4 or later), add WeatherOverTime to the Home Screen first, open it from there, and turn notifications on from this page inside it. Each browser and device is set up on its own.
What is stored
To send a notice, the site keeps the address your browser's push service gave it, the keys that encrypt each message to your browser, and the name and coordinates of each place you turned on, with your choices. Nothing else, and no account or email. Messages are encrypted end to end: the push service (Google, Mozilla, Apple or Microsoft, depending on the browser) carries them without being able to read them. Turning notifications off deletes the record. See the privacy policy.
Notices are a convenience, not a warning system. They can be late or not arrive at all. Keep a weather radio or your phone's emergency alerts on for warnings.