We made a lot of improvements to Perry Weather over the past year. Here’s a fast rundown from our Summer Platform Update webinar with Blake Harvey, VP of Product, so your staff can hit the ground running this season.
The New Heat Stress Card and 3-Day Forecasts
The New Heat Stress Card: puts your current risk level right on your dashboard, mapped to your organization’s heat stress policy, whether you follow WBGT, heat index, or temperature.
3-day forecasts: Perry Weather now forecasts exactly when you’ll hit each heat zone, as a graph or an hour-by-hour heat map. Now, plan ahead better for practices and games.
Activity guidelines: Set custom guidelines or detailed instructions for every WBGT or Heat Index risk level, so that everyone is on the same page on how and when to modify activities.
- Custom instructions, thresholds, colors, and risk level names
- Separate policies for high schools and middle schools, assigned by location
- Require policies by user group, so compliance isn’t dependent on individual user settings
- Full mobile support
Seeing a plain gradient instead of zones? That means no policy is connected yet.
Learn how to Connect a Policy here.
Improvements to Lightning Detection
Lightning data comes from the National Lightning Detection Network, covering both cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud strikes. The time it takes between lightning striking and a message being delivered is an industry-leading average of 16 seconds, so countdown timers, alerts, sirens, and strobes all activate right on time.
Lightning timers now visible in the radar: You can now click individual locations and spot check each location’s lightning status.
Triggers: A New Way to Control Your Sirens
Policy Triggers: Your sirens, strobes, and PA used to handle lightning and manual activation. Now they respond to almost anything, which means one alerting system covers tornadoes, flash floods, and more.
Tornado warnings, prioritized above lightning so evacuation messages interrupt shelter-in-place messages
Trigger PA messages for Black zone WBGT announcements
Custom Triggers: Trigger PA messages and sirens based on a recurring routine, schedule them in advance, or create them for manual activation later.
- Create a library of non-weather-related manual emergency responses like active shooter responses or evacuations. Connects with other intercom and mass communications tools like Singlewire.
- Schedule recurring PA messages for drills
- Recurring PA messages like field open at 6 a.m. and field closed at 5 p.m.
Each trigger gets its own tone, duration, play count, PA message, and all-clear. Triggers also drive our new Multi-Strobe Visual Warning System, which gives you four strobes you can assign to different policies.
Policy Activity Reporting: Measure the Impact of Weather Delays
This is the report you want when someone asks you to justify a canceled tournament or respond to an incident report. It tracks every time a policy was triggered, including how long each delay lasted and who was impacted.
- Individual delay logs or full-season summaries
- Total hours spent in each risk level. Great for seeing how practices were impacted by WBGT Black or Red zones
- Works across lightning, heat stress, cold stress, humidity, and NWS policies
Improvements for Districts and Multi-Location Schools
Favorites and saved views: The software now lets you pin the locations you monitor so you’re not scrolling an entire district to find one field.
User management: Bulk edit users, resend activation emails, export your roster, clean it up in a spreadsheet, and bulk upload it back in. Connect an SSO provider to manage access externally.
Onboarding forms: Let people enroll themselves through a QR code or link. You set the permission level, user group, location access, and approval rules. Add a user expiration, and tournament staff get 24-hour access, then drop off automatically without eating a permanent seat.
Custom Triggers, advanced user management, saved views, location tags, and APIs are part of our Plus and Advanced packages.
Upgrade from Core to Plus or Advanced here.
Q&As from the Webinar
Answered Live
Where do I connect a heat stress policy, where’s the 3-day forecast, and is it in the mobile app?
Click the policy icon in the left navigation, or “Connect a Policy” on the heat stress card. Once a policy is connected, click Forecast Max on that card for the 3-day forecast, viewable as a graph or a heat map. Everything is optimized for mobile and sits underneath the location in the app. If your card shows a plain gradient instead of risk zones, no policy is connected yet, which is also why you wouldn’t see the hour-by-hour forecast.
Can a user group be assigned a policy that isn’t based on location? Our high school teams play at the junior high campus and need to follow high school WBGT policy.
Yes, you can achieve this by creating two different weather policies for the same location. Apply the policy only to the high school team user group.
Is the WBGT number in the app a 15-minute average? Our handhelds typically need 15 minutes to stabilize.
Perry Weather stations collect WBGT every 5 minutes and refresh it on your dashboard every 5 minutes. Because it is outdoors 24/7, it has no need to acclimatize to the outdoor air temperature for 15 minutes like a handheld device.
What’s the difference between activity guidelines and notifications?
If you navigate to your weather policies, you’ll see the option under each risk level to add a notification. When you add a notification, Perry Weather auto-generates a standard message telling you the current weather conditions at that time. You also have the option to set a custom message, which can include instructions on what to do at each risk level. Because it is a notification, you can keep it short and concise.
Activity guidelines are meant to be an area where you can include more detailed information or instructions related to each risk level. Activity guidelines will appear when you click on “Forecast Max” on your heat stress policy.
How is Perry Weather’s lightning data more accurate and current than a traditional weather app?
We pull from the National Lightning Detection Network, the gold standard for national coverage, capturing both cloud-to-ground and intra-cloud activity. We process those results nearly instantaneously after the sensors have processed the signal. So the moment a strike lands, the entire process from strike to notification is around 16 seconds.
We just had hardware installed and haven’t read through the setup emails. Is most of this set by default, or do I build it from scratch?
You won’t be building it alone. Every customer has a dedicated account manager who configures these rules with you, and who stays available for check-ins well after you’re live.
Contact us here if you have a question about your account.
If sirens are silenced during school hours and go live at 3:30, and lightning strikes at 3:15, will the siren sound at 3:30 to signal an active delay?
Perry Weather triggers sirens twice during lightning delays. Once for the initial alert and once for the all clear. After the initial alert, the strobe will continue to blink throughout the duration of the delay. If the all clear is given after quiet hours, then the siren will not activate.
Do temporary users count against our district’s user total, and do outside contractors need the app to get notifications?
They occupy a slot while their access is active, and as soon as the expiration hits they drop off, so they’re not taking up a seat down the road. Notifications depend on how you set them up. Notification-only users just need a phone number for texts or an email address for emails, no app required.
Questions We Didn’t Get To
How accurate are the 3-day WBGT forecasts in areas with strong microclimate variability?
WBGT forecasting in Perry Weather is a reliable way to help plan practices and game times, but no forecast is perfect. Treat the 3-day forecast as a planning tool for scheduling, and treat your on-site station as the source of truth for go or no-go decisions.
Can the the rate at which the weather station samples weather data be changed?
No, Perry Weather stations take readings every 5 minutes and send them directly to the Perry Weather dashboard. In comparison, public METAR data is often pulled every hour. The station operates this way in order to sample reliable accumulation and average data across all weather conditions.
Can a limited admin adjust policy thresholds or notification verbiage, or is that admin-only?
Only admins and owners can edit policies and alert notifications.
Are the additional triggers only available with Plus and Advanced tiers?
Automated lightning alerting on your hardware is available to every account. Custom Triggers are part of our Plus and Advanced packages, along with advanced user management, saved views, location tags, and APIs. Your account manager can tell you what your current package includes.
Request an upgrade here.
Does a notification-only user take up a user spot, and is there an additional cost for temporary users?
Any active user counts against your limit regardless of type. Temporary users are the exception in that they release their seat automatically at expiration, so there’s no added cost as long as you’re within your limit.
During a nearby fire, AirNow reported Moderate air quality while Perry Weather showed Good. Does Perry Weather use a less conservative standard?
AirNow reports from the nearest public sensor, which can sit many miles from your campus, and smoke plumes are highly localized and directed by wind. Depending on where that monitor sits relative to the fire, either reading can be the more conservative one.
Perry Weather’s air quality sensor monitors two primary particulates: PM10 and PM2.5. Ozone is provided by our partners at OpenAQ. On-site monitoring will always be the most accurate measure of the true air quality.
Is it necessary to actively log WBGT data, or is it sufficient that we can pull historical data from Perry Weather at any time?
Requirements vary by state, so check your specific mandate. That said, most mandates call for logging every 30 minutes, and you can automate that rather than doing it by hand. Set a recurring report at your required interval and it arrives on schedule, ready to download, share, or drop into your system of record. Policy Activity Reporting covers the other half, documenting every delay, how long it lasted, and who was impacted.
If we’re looking at a venue’s station that isn’t in our organization, can we see the heat stress forecast if they have a policy linked?
No, the forecasting capabilities rely on your policy being linked to an organization location.
