About

Hazard Notifier provides notifications of hazards in your area and maps the distance and estimated occurrence of the hazards to your location. The application also allows you to report hazardous events so a community of users can be notified of nearby hazards that have just begun to occur around them, which can help notify others about possibly unsafe events before they have even been formally declared.

The Hazard Notifier application allows you to highly customize the hazard notifications you receive. Select from many types of hazard notifications to receive and specify the distance to be notified within, the time between notifications, and sound options.

Hazard notifications can be sent to you while you are in motion. If you use the device location for your location, hazard notifications will be sent to you as you enter the area of a hazard.

In the event the Hazard Notifier application cannot establish communications you can continue to report hazards or make changes.** When the application detects connectivity, hazard reports and/or changes are sent.

Most hazards shown come from official sources — the National Weather Service, the United States Geological Survey, the Smithsonian and USGS volcano programme, and the international GDACS disaster system — which is why hazards appear worldwide and not only where somebody is using the application. Alongside those, Hazard Notifier relies on a community of people to report hazardous events. The intent of this application is to increase the chance you will be notified of a hazard in your area by allowing a community to report hazards and by allowing for approximations of reported hazards. As such, reported events will not be 100% accurate. The location and time of reported hazards will be estimated. In some cases, there may be false hazardous notifications.

The functionality of the main tabs for the application are as follows:

HAZARDS

The map will show icons of regional hazards and your hazard notifications which have occurred in your area within the past 24 hours.

The world icon is your designated location.

Touching the icon will display information about the event. User reported hazards can be reported as false. Reporting hazards as false must be done from the Home notifications map view. Reporting a hazard that is false helps the automated reporting algorithm judge later reports.

You can view the map in standard, satellite, and hybrid modes. The default mode is set to standard mode, which gives road and street names. The satellite mode shows aerial imagery of the earth. The hybrid mode gives both standard and satellite views. You can zoom in and out in these modes.

The Cloud button turns on/off Doppler rain radar for the US.

The Home button displays your hazard notifications received within the last 24 hours. The Home button toggles to a Globe button.

The Globe button displays the current hazards in your region and around the globe. The Globe button toggles to the Home button.

The List button lists the hazard events that have occurred within the last 24 hours. Touching the event in the list will give you more information about the event including its description, date and time of the occurrence, and distance of the event.

REPORTING

Reporting allows you to report a hazardous event. You can report a hazard by selecting a hazard type and pressing send. A short optional description can be entered. The device's location can be used or you can enter a location. Latitude and longitude can be used to report a hazard by entering the decimal value of the latitude and longitude in the City field separated by a comma. Once a hazard has been reported, distribution to the community is automated by an adaptive hazard reporting algorithm.

MY LOCATION

My Location enables you to use your device's location so that notifications of nearby hazards will be sent to your phone/device. To show hazards on the map in a different location, turn off your device's location and enter a specific location. If the device location is enabled Hazard Notifier can make significant location change updates while running in background mode so you can be notified when moving into the area of a hazard. If you prefer, you may turn off collection of significant location changes in background mode by disabling "Update Location in Background".

SETTINGS

Allows you to enable and disable event types that you wish to be informed about in your area. Use of Hazard Notifier settings requires that the Hazard Notifier application is enabled for notifications. If notifications were not allowed when the application first started, turn them on in the iOS Settings app under Notifications > Hazard Notifier > Allow Notifications.

The "Enable All" button enables all the events in the list. You will get notifications for all events listed.

The "Disable All" button disables all the events in the list. You will not get notifications for any of the events listed.

The "Set Defaults" button will set default values in the list.

Selecting a hazard in the list allows detailed settings for that specific hazard which includes: turning the notification on or off, playing the sound for the notification, turning the sound on or off, setting the hazard sound to be the default for all notifications, turning user reported hazards on or off, selecting a distance for notifications, and selecting the time between notifications. For example, enabling a tornado event to "Notify me within certain miles of a tornado" allows a notification to appear when a tornado occurs within the chosen distance. Time between notifications allows the notification to be repeated after the chosen time length. To enable a notification alert for a tornado, touch the tornado in the list, toggle the notify button to "ON" and toggle the sound, if you wish to be notified by sound. Press the play icon to hear the notification sound and toggle "Apply this sound to all notifications" to play the notification sound for all hazard notifications. Move the slider bar to the distance and enter the hours and minutes for minimum time between notifications. Touch the "Done" button to store your settings.

The "Reset Default Notification Values" button will reset its default values for that event.

HELP

The Help tab allows you to view reporting statistics which includes the number of users who potentially could receive a hazard report, a reporting level based on the number of successful hazards reported, and a world wide rank for the number of successful hazards reported. Your reporting level can decrease if other users report your hazard notifications as false.

The Help tab allows you to view a simulation of hazards, the Hazards map is displayed with simulated hazard markers.

The Help tab also provides How to Use, Privacy, and About information.

**A box around each tab icon at the bottom means the Hazard Notifier application is unable to establish communications, but you can still work in an offline mode. When connectivity is detected the Hazard Notifier application will send hazard reports and/or notification settings changes. When connectivity is established the box around the tab icon will be removed so you know if you have connectivity.