• After witnessing the continued decrease of involvement in the SpotterNetwork staff in serving SN members with troubleshooting issues recently, I have unilaterally decided to terminate the relationship between SpotterNetwork's support and Stormtrack. I have witnessed multiple users unable to receive support weeks after initiating help threads on the forum. I find this lack of response from SpotterNetwork officials disappointing and a failure to hold up their end of the agreement that was made years ago, before I took over management of this site. In my opinion, having Stormtrack users sit and wait for so long to receive help on SpotterNetwork issues on the Stormtrack forums reflects poorly not only on SpotterNetwork, but on Stormtrack and (by association) me as well. Since the issue has not been satisfactorily addressed, I no longer wish for the Stormtrack forum to be associated with SpotterNetwork.

    I apologize to those who continue to have issues with the service and continue to see their issues left unaddressed. Please understand that the connection between ST and SN was put in place long before I had any say over it. But now that I am the "captain of this ship," it is within my right (nay, duty) to make adjustments as I see necessary. Ending this relationship is such an adjustment.

    For those who continue to need help, I recommend navigating a web browswer to SpotterNetwork's About page, and seeking the individuals listed on that page for all further inquiries about SpotterNetwork.

    From this moment forward, the SpotterNetwork sub-forum has been hidden/deleted and there will be no assurance that any SpotterNetwork issues brought up in any of Stormtrack's other sub-forums will be addressed. Do not rely on Stormtrack for help with SpotterNetwork issues.

    Sincerely, Jeff D.

IEMBOT/NWSCHAT-BASED ALERT SERVICE

Gary Fritz

Enthusiast
Joined
Sep 17, 2016
Messages
3
Location
Ferdinand, IN
I’d like to share some insight on a service which provides access to NWS warnings the moment they are issued – with this service you will often receive warnings 15 to 30 seconds before they are transmitted over NOAA Weather Radio. The service is IEMBOT which is a set of programs running on the Iowa Mesonet server and is intended to aid in the dissemination and use of NWS warnings by their chat partners. While NWS chatrooms are closed to public access the JavaScript client web interface at https://weather.im/iembot/ is open to the public and updates every 8 seconds providing instant access to warnings. We’ve taken this approach one step further by directly ingesting the IEM JSON service to process the warnings in support of our EMA operations. The result is an Emergency Management Office application which verbally announces “Tornado Warning” or “Severe Thunderstorm Warning” when such warnings are issued for nearby counties as severe weather approaches. When a tornado warning is issued for Dubois County in Indiana our computers sound off “ATTENTION…..A TORNADO WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR DUBOIS COUNTY….REPEATING…” and our emergency callout system can be engaged before the public receives the warning via NWR. Here are links to some of the audio alerts issued by our system: Tornado Warning Severe Thunderstorm Warning
 
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Great resource while chasing. I have access to the NWSChat version, but would highly recommend leaving this up. It's easy to glance over and see what is going on, and you can see reports as they come in, etc. NWSChat is a little better, but it's mostly up for NWSBot. The only thing that sucks is it takes a good 5-10 minutes sometimes for SPC outlooks to post after they show up, so you can click the link and get a 404 error at first.
 
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