CASA Alerts Avis

Cities and towns that support CASA WX receive severe weather warnings issued by the National Weather Service, hyper-local alerts derived from CASA radar data, Understory sensors, and local storm spotter reports, based on user preferences for alerting, and locations of interest.

CASA Alerts is a multi-purpose mobile app developed by the CASA Engineering Research Center ( ), led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst, aimed at improving user-centric, context-aware severe weather forecasts and warnings using CASA’s City Warn™ platform.

The CASA Alerts Mobile app delivers weather information and/or surveys to users on mobile phones to improve our understanding of the best ways to deliver weather information for thunderstorms, tornados, hail, high winds and floods.

· CASA WX users: CASA collaborates with the North Central Texas Council of Governments and the National Weather Service to bring detailed, rapidly updating radar data to North Central Texas through the CASA WX program.

Different users may receive different types of weather information, and some may not receive any weather information at all so we can learn about what people currently use for severe weather information.

· Other users: These participants receive surveys that explore individual’s perceptions of severe weather risks.

CASA’s work has been supported through various National Science Foundation grants such as Hazards SEES (#1331572), Building innovation Capacity (#1632193), FIA-NP, FIA (#1345300, #1040781) programs.

We periodically request feedback from users in the form of mobile phone surveys.

Academic participants include University of Massachusetts, Colorado State University and the University of Delaware.

App functionality and user experience varies depending on the user.

Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.