StormSiren
StormSiren is a personal severe weather monitoring and alerting tool that communicates National Weather Service issued bulletins on severe converctive weather, specifically tornados and severe thunderstorms. The program is designed to run via a scheduling program (such as cron or a windows scheduler) and scan the NWS Interactive Weather Information Network for watches and warnings affecting user specified locations. When such bulletins are detected, the program sends a concise summary of the alert to one or more devices via SMTP, such as a pager, SMS capable wireless phone, or standard e-mail account. The summaries are designed to fit within a 160 character display, and contain the type of hazard, the affected counties and cities defined by the user, and the issue and expiration times of the bulletins.
The program supports tornado and severe thunderstorm watches and warnings. When run for the first time, StormSiren runs a text mode "wizard" to query the user for configuration information, including states, specific counties and optionally cities to scan for, and this information is used to write the configuration file.
This simple program is written in the Python programming language. It has been developed and tested under Python version 2.2, though earlier versions of the language will likely work as well. It has been tested on a number of platforms, including Linux, Solaris 2.8, OS/2 Warp, Windows 2000, and Windows 98.
In order to run StormSiren, you'll need to have Python on your system. If you don't already have it, you can get it from www.python.org. If you are a windows user, you may be able to run the program by double clicking the program if the distribution supports it. For Unix/Linux users, you may or may not need to modify the first line shebang and/or set the file permissions properly. RedHat users may want to change the shebang to #!/usr/bin/env python2. The first time you run the program, it will walk you through setting up a configuration file. Once you've completed the setup, you can edit it at any time with a text editor, or just delete or rename the config file and StormSiren will run the configuration wizard again.
Once you have your configuration setup, you'll want to test it by running the program with the '-testpage' directive. This will send a test alert to all your configured devices, to make sure you have things running correctly.
- Example
- Unix: ./StormSiren.py -testpage Windows: c:\Python22\python.exe StormSiren.py -testpage
Once you've got your configuration file set up, you can schedule the program to run automatically. I normally run it under a cron clone called Cron/2 on an OS/2 box of mine. Unix/Linux cron works fine as well. Under Windows 2000/XP the Windows scheduler can be used for scheduling, and the AT command provides the same function under NT 4.0.
StormSiren can send two types of messages, short text (SMS) and full text. SMS mode sends short text messages to SMS type devices such as cell phones, pagers, and wireless enabled PDAs. Full text (e-mail) mode sends the full text of the NWS bulletin. This allows you to get an alert on your wireless device, and then you can check the full details of the alert if you have quick access to your mail, or otherwise check your local TV news or radio if not.
Additional information on the program is included at the StormSiren web site at http://stormsiren.sourceforge.net.
StormSiren is distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). A copy of the license is included with this distribution.
Rory McManus <slorf@users.sourceforge.net>