Use this handy App to track rain and storms
Here at the offices of balloonteam.net we have just experienced over an hour of torrential rain, hail and thunder – yes it was our first spring storm.
As we watched the storm’s progress on our favourite storm-tracker website, we thought now would be a great time to share with our readers this particularly useful and free service which keeps us alerted to oncoming bad weather and is also invaluable when doing flight planning.
The online service we use is Rain-Alarm (www.rain-alarm.com). It is available as an online website for your desktop, and also as mobile Apps for iOS, Android and Windows Phone. The desktop version comes with a bunch of plug-in “app” modules for all the popular browsers including IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome.
The simple idea of Rain-Alarm is to warn you against approaching precipitation like rain or snow. Rain-Alarm uses Doppler or Radar images collected and published by governmental weather services across the world and is updated in real-time. The app checks every couple of minutes for the presence of rain in a customisable radius and if there is something approaching the app shows you a notification. If you are using a desktop browser the notification appears in the System Tray (Windows) or Notifications Area (Mac) and as an on screen Notification alert on mobile devices.
Worldwide coverage is pretty good and Rain-Alarm works across the whole of the USA (including Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam), Canada, Mexico, El Salvador, Argentina, Australia, Taiwan, Japan, Republic of Korea, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Finland, Norway, Iceland, the Netherlands, Spain (including the Balearic and the Canary Islands), Slovenia, Croatia, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia.
We’ve noticed that, when travelling, you should open the Rain-Alarm app on your device when you reach a new location so that it can update your location to give you updates for that area – otherwise we found we still get alerts for home even while we are attending an event hundreds, or even thousands, of miles away.
A quick note for world-wide travellers; Rain-Alarm does need to be online to keep updated and so you will need to consider the cost of mobile data when travelling to attend events abroad.
We hope you will find this service as useful as we do. If you have not used it before, give it a try and tell us what you think in the comments box below. If you use an alternative app, we’d like to hear about that too.
