Trigger Warning Systems Based On Any Weather Condition
Perry Weather users are no longer limited to triggering their system for lightning alone. Now, any policy you've set up in your Policies tab can be used to trigger hardware. That includes:
- Lightning Distance
- Heat Stress
- Cold Stress
- Precipitation
- Wind
- Air Quality Index
- 50+ National Weather Service Alerts
If you have questions about setting up a policy before building your trigger, check out out our policy management article.
Triggers give you control over how and when your onsite hardware activates. Instead of activating warning systems for Lightning only, you can now tie specific hardware actions — like activating sirens, PA messages, or strobes — to any weather policy in your account.
NEW: Changed to How Hardware Lightning Radii Are Managed
Prior to this update, modifying your lightning policy's radius only controlled when mobile notifications were sent, while your warning systems settings remained separate.
Now, you can set up hardware triggers to activate your hardware based on the same policy as your mobile notifications.
Below will walk you through the set up.
Setting Up New Triggers
Step 1: Open the Onsite Hardware Tab
Navigate to the Onsite Hardware tab from your main dashboard. Here you'll see all of your connected hardware and any triggers that have already been created.
Step 2: Create a New Trigger
Click Add Trigger and select the hardware unit you want to configure. Then choose the weather policy that should activate it.
You can use any policy type — National Weather Service, lightning, wind, precipitation, or any custom policy you've built in the Policies tab.
Select which risk level should engage your trigger and which hardware units will activate.
By default, triggers respect your audible alert time settings. If you want a trigger to fire at any time regardless of those settings, which makes sense for life-safety alerts like tornado warnings, toggle on 24/7 alert override.
Step 3: Configure the Alert
Once you've selected your policy and hardware, open the delay configuration to set up what happens when the alert fires.
You have three components to configure:
Siren — Choose a siren tone, set the duration, and set how many times it plays.
PA Message — Select a saved message or write a custom one. Set how many times it plays.
Strobe — On a single-strobe unit, toggle the strobe on or off for this alert.
On a Multi-Strobe unit, each of the four strobes — Clear, Red, Amber, and Blue — is its own Connection. Instead of a single toggle, select which color(s) should activate for this policy. A few rules to keep in mind:
- One hazard per strobe. Each strobe can be tied to only one hazard type per unit. Once you assign Red to this policy, Red can't also be assigned to a different policy on the same unit.
- Multiple strobes, same hazard. You can assign more than one color to the same hazard if you want a stronger visual signal (for example, both Red and Blue for Lightning).
- Color meaning is yours to define. Colors have no fixed universal meaning — map each one to the hazard that fits your facility's protocol (for example, Red = Tornado Warning, Blue = Lightning, Amber = High Wind, Clear = Heat Stress).
Tip — Heat stress / WBGT escalation: you can map different colors to escalating risk levels (e.g., one strobe at Moderate, a second at High, a third at Extreme). As conditions worsen, additional strobes activate while the earlier ones stay on, giving workers a running visual read of how severe it's gotten.
Step 4: Configure the All Clear
The all clear controls what happens when the alert condition ends.
How the all clear triggers depends on your policy type:
- National Weather Service alerts — triggers when the National Weather Service expires
- Condition-based policies (lightning, wind, etc.) — triggers when the condition clears, such as no lightning detected for 30 minutes or wind speed dropping below your policy threshold
On a Multi-Strobe unit, only the strobe(s) tied to the cleared policy turn off. Any strobes assigned to other hazards that are still active will keep flashing until those conditions clear.
Set your all clear siren, PA message, and strobe behavior the same way you configured the initial alert.
Step 5: Review and Create
Before saving, review the full trigger summary to confirm everything looks right — tone, duration, play count, PA message, and strobe for both the alert and the all clear.
When you're ready, click Create Trigger.
Step 6: Modify the Priority
Update the priority of your triggers to reflect which conditions are most severe or impactful to your organization.
In the case or a dual weather event, triggers closer to the top will override any of the lower level triggers, interrupting the any active warnings and issuing the highest priority warning.
How priority affects Multi-Strobe: Priority governs the siren and PA message, which announce only the highest-priority active alert at any given time.
Strobes work differently — they operate independently of priority. Every strobe assigned to an active hazard flashes at the same time, regardless of ranking, so workers can see all active conditions at a glance. As each condition clears, its strobe turns off while the others keep flashing.
This means that during a dual weather event, your siren may be announcing the top-priority hazard while multiple strobes are lit for everything currently active.
Modify the priority, by clicking the up or down arrows on the trigger.
Related to