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 — Toggle on or off.
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
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.
Modify the priority, by clicking the up or down arrows on the trigger.
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