Weather Integrations and Severe Weather Alerts in Home Assistant

It's the beginning of severe weather season here in my part of the world and that means it's time to start paying attention and be ready for the potential of strong wind, tornadoes, hail, flooding, lightning, and who knows what else.

Home Assistant has quite a few weather integrations that can keep you up-to-date on what's happening outside. These range from forecast services to environmental and observational services.

In addition to those listed above, there are others that have been developed by the community and made available with Home Assistant via HACS or other methods. One such is the Blitzorung lightning counter, based on this site.

Once you have the integrations in place, you can build a dashboard to display all your weather data in one place, including embedded maps. As a matter of fact, I've got some severe weather and watches in my area on the map below.

You can even create automations to act on those and provide alerts for things like nearby lightning strikes, severe weather alerts, high or low temperatures, etc. I find that this is the best use of this data.

Sample yaml code block (This can all be done in the UI though!)

alias: Lightning Alert
description: ''
trigger:
  - platform: numeric_state
    entity_id: sensor.blitzortung_lightning_counter
    above: '10'
condition: []
action:
  - service: notify.mobile_app_chriss22plus
    data:
      message: Lightning Detected
      title: Lightning Detected
      data:
        priority: high
        ttl: 0
        channel: lightning
mode: single

An example is lightning data. You might be hanging out at the community pool or at the neighbors having a bar-b-que and a storm approaches. If it has lightning, it has the potential to be severe and Home Assistant can alert you.

Take a look at my video for all the details on how to set everything up.