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.
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 lockdowns or evacuations.
- Schedule recurring PA messages for drills
- Recurring PA messages like park open at 6 a.m. and 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. You can also turn any strobe on manually and use it as a standalone status light across a site.
The Multi-Strobe Visual Warning System
Four strobes, four policies: Launched in the last few months, the Multi-Strobe Visual Warning System expands on our existing strobe hardware. You get four lights, and each one connects to a different policy, so staff can read conditions at a glance without waiting to hear an announcement.
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 department’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 leagues, camps, and events.
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 different sites, assigned by location, so an aquatic center and a sports complex can follow different rules
- 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.Triggers: A New Way to Control Your Sirens
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 programming was impacted by WBGT Black or Red zones
- Works across lightning, heat stress, cold stress, humidity, and NWS policies
- Tracks any location you monitor, even sites without hardware installed, including away venues and smaller neighborhood parks
Standard weather station reports are separate and still available. Pick your station, date range, and variables, choose a 15- or 30-minute interval, and set it to recur daily, weekly, or monthly so it lands in your inbox on schedule.
[IMAGE: Report builder]
Improvements for Cities and Multi-Site Departments
Favorites and saved views: The software now lets you pin the locations you monitor so you’re not scrolling an entire department 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 event staff get 24-hour access, then drop off automatically without eating a permanent seat.
Alert mode: For staff who cover multiple sites instead of sitting at one, set a geofence radius so alerts follow them. They get alerted for whichever site they’re currently at, rather than by a fixed schedule.
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
Do you bundle all the parks and send out one siren notice, or do you trigger each location individually?
Either way works, and it’s a per-trigger decision rather than an account-wide setting. When you build a trigger, you pick the policy risk level that fires it, then select which hardware units it applies to. Attach every siren you want covered and one trigger blankets all of them. Attach one and it stays local to that site.
