ABOUT

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

NOTIFICATIONS YOU CONTROL

Hazard Notifier lets you highly customize the notifications you receive. Select from many types of hazard, and for each one specify the distance you want to be notified within, the time between repeat notifications, and sound options. Each hazard can carry its own alert sound, so the ones that matter most to you do not sound like the ones that do not, or you can apply a single sound to everything.

NOTIFICATIONS WHILE YOU ARE IN MOTION

Hazard notifications can be sent to you while you are moving. If you use the device location for your location, notifications are sent as you enter the area of a hazard rather than only when one appears where you started.

WHERE HAZARDS COME FROM

Hazards are gathered from monitoring sources around the world as well as from the reporting community, which is why they appear globally and not only where somebody happens to be using the application. Those sources change over time.

Because the application relies in part on a community of people reporting events, reported events will not be 100% accurate. The location and time of reported hazards are estimated, and in some cases there may be false reports. Reported hazards are filtered before broadcast, so many submitted reports are never sent to the community.

HAZARDS

The map shows icons for regional hazards and for the notifications you have received in your area within the past 24 hours. The world icon is your designated location. Touching an icon displays information about the event.

You can view the map in standard, satellite, and hybrid modes, and zoom in and out in each. Standard is the default and gives road and street names, satellite shows aerial imagery, and hybrid gives both. The Cloud button turns Doppler rain radar on and off for the US.

The Home button displays the hazard notifications you received within the last 24 hours, and toggles to a Globe button. The Globe button displays current hazards in your region and around the world, and toggles back to Home. The List button lists the events of the last 24 hours; touching one gives its description, the date and time it occurred, and its distance from you.

A user-reported hazard can be reported as false from the Home notifications map view. Reporting a hazard as false helps the automated reporting algorithm judge later reports.

REPORTING

Reporting lets you report a hazardous event. Select a hazard type and press send; a short optional description can be entered. The device's location can be used, or you can enter a location yourself. Latitude and longitude can also be used by entering their decimal values 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 lets you use your device's location so notifications of nearby hazards are sent to your device. To show hazards on the map for a different place, turn off the device location and enter a specific location instead. If the device location is enabled, Hazard Notifier can make significant location change updates while running in the background so you can be notified when moving into the area of a hazard. You may turn that off by disabling "Update Location in Background".

SETTINGS

Settings lets you enable and disable the event types you wish to be informed about in your area. Using these settings requires that Hazard Notifier 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.

"Enable All" turns on every event in the list, "Disable All" turns them all off, and "Set Defaults" restores default values. Selecting a hazard opens its detailed settings: turning the notification on or off, playing and enabling its sound, applying that sound to all notifications, including or excluding user-reported hazards, the distance to be notified within, and the minimum time between notifications. "Reset Default Notification Values" restores the defaults for that event.

HELP

The Help tab shows your reporting statistics, including the number of users who could potentially receive a hazard you report, a reporting level based on the number of successful reports, and a worldwide rank. Your reporting level can decrease if other users report your hazards as false.

Help also includes a simulation that fills the hazards map with example markers, so you can see how the application behaves before any weather arrives, along with How to Use, Privacy, and About information.

A box around each tab icon at the bottom of the application means Hazard Notifier is unable to establish communications, but you can still work offline — reporting hazards and changing settings. When connectivity is detected, your queued reports and setting changes are sent and the box around the tab icons is removed.

Hazard Notifier is a source of information, not an emergency service. It does not replace official warnings from your local authorities.