Alerts and notifications

Alerting is built around markers — the places you’ve saved. Search a place in the panel, and take Save marker when the map flies there. Mark one of them as home and it gets a watch ring on the map.

New to the map boundaries? See the visual watch and warning guide for the colors and line patterns used on radar.

Choosing how you’re told

Settings → Alerts picks the channels. You can use as many as you like:

• a chime from the app,
• a desktop notification,
• a phone push via ntfy.sh,
• a webhook into Discord, Slack or Matrix,
• the warning read aloud through your system or browser voice.

Spoken alerts are scoped to warnings visible on the map, independently of saved-place push notifications. Open Settings → Alerts, enable spoken alerts, and run the test warning. Browsers require this activation once per page session and cannot speak after the page closes. HookEcho shows a recovery message if a device voice is missing or playback fails. Emergency speech interrupts routine warning speech; Stop speech and the master mute remain available.

Choosing what you’re told about

• Warnings covering a marker — or coming within its watch radius. Home defaults to 20 miles, and you’re alerted when the polygon’s edge reaches that ring, not only when it swallows your house.
• Lightning striking within about 15 km of a saved spot.
• Rain arrival — “rain in about 20 minutes”, from the radar’s own motion.
• Rotation and debris signatures detected on the live volume.

Severe warnings aren’t all equal, and neither are the alerts. HookEcho reads the NWS escalation tiers — CONSIDERABLE, then DESTRUCTIVE or an observed tornado, then a Tornado Emergency — and a higher tier gets a pulsing polygon, a red threat chip at the top of the alert list, a dedicated siren, and an urgent-priority push. Whether it sounds during quiet hours depends on your phone and receiving app settings.

Where the storm actually is

Every warning carries the office’s own storm-motion description, which HookEcho parses into a vector: the warned storm as a dot and its projected path up to 30 minutes. When the radar product publishes an error estimate, HookEcho uses it for the corridor and presents arrival as a range. Without that support, it says the arrival cannot be estimated reliably. Tracks are estimates, not official warnings or forecasts, and stale projections are suppressed.

On your phone

Opt into the background service and Android notifies you with the app closed, tiered watch / warning / emergency, and tapping through takes you to the storm. A home-screen widget shows what’s warned at your saved locations. See On your phone.

On a machine you leave running

The desktop build keeps alerting from the tray. If you want the map itself available elsewhere on your own network, --serve publishes it as a local HTTP endpoint.

Check your setup

Save a marker, select the channels you want, and check notification permission in your operating system. Browser alerts need an open tab; Android background alerts need the background service enabled. If delivery fails, follow the notification checklist.