Why did this NWS alert speak at 4am??

[matt91]

I've been using WeatherXML in my HS3 Pro system for a number of years now. For the most part, it's been rock solid. However, over the past month or so, I've had a few alerts speak during the overnight 'muted' hours, and I'm trying to track down why.

This particular alert played right at 4am, even though it shouldn't have. The severity level is minor, which shouldn't play until 7am.

Is there something wacky going on, or did I just mess with the wrong setting someplace? (Also, is there some other place I've missed where there are options for speaking alerts?)

Thanks,

Matt

[slbuck]

I just had one go off at 3am this morning and this is what I found. I believe this will work, but won't know until the next time this happens.

For any alert triggers, there are urgencies defined that have to be met for the alert to happen. To get this working, you have to override the urgency for the different alert severities. In your example, you have the Urgency Override set to "None". This means that as long as the urgency of the original alert is met by your trigger, you'll hear it at 4am.

Here is how I have it set up and believe it will work correctly.

Under my alert settings for the location that I have my trigger defined, I specify which severities and which urgencies will be available to the triggers. This is important since it pre-filters the alerts to only those that are interesting for your location.


For the urgency, I selected all of them except for Unknown. I really only want immediate, expected, and future for my triggers, but I chose past since this is where I'll override my severities so they don't match at night.



And here's my override for the Moderate severity alerts. I've found that typically, ongoing alerts for things like flood warnings, freeze warnings, etc. will have a moderate severity assigned by NOAA. This is the trial and error part of this in learning what severities are assigned to alerts that you don't want to be woken up in the middle of the night. In my case, I don't override extreme or severe since I want to be woken up for those events (typically tornado warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings).



Now, on my alert trigger, here is what I'm matching for urgency and severity. Note that I do not have the "Past" urgency selected as part of the trigger. When the Moderate severity alert is received between 11pm and 8am, the urgency is overridden to Past and so will no longer meet the cutoff in the trigger.




I hope this helps with setting up your alert.