Warning Info

QWeather supports weather warning services(API, iOS SDK, Android SDK) for many countries or regions around the world. You can find more descriptions of these warnings here, such as the list of supported countries and regions, warning levels and warning types.

All warning level, type, urgency and other fields are possible to change, including add/modify/delete. We may not be able to give advance notice of these changes, so you have to make your code more compatible to avoid errors when they happen.

We recommend not trying to enumerate these values or mappings, but to output them directly to the screen.

Weather warning do not always work with multilingual setting. When a warning message does not respond to your multilingual setting, we will return the message in either English or the local language, or even part of the content in English and part in the local language.

Supported Regions

Weather warnings are not available for all cities, we will continue to expand these data, currently QWeather supports the following countries or regions.

Weather warning are based on official data from government departments in each country. When official data is not released properly, we may temporarily take offline the country where the failure occurred.

You can use the range parameter to get a list of all warning cities for that country or regions via Warning City List API.

Status

warning.status denotes the status of the current warning published, including:

• Active - Warning is active
• Update - The current warning is an update or modification to a previously specified warning.
• Cancel - The previously specified warning is cancelled for various reasons. This is a reserved value and you cannot use it to determine if the warning is active.

Expiry time

Typically, a warning message is not valid for more than 48 hours, so if warning.endTime is not available, we recommend to set the expiry time of this warning message to 24 hours from warning.startTime (which is what we do).

You can use warning.endTime to estimate when a warning message will expire, or when you can no longer get a warning message with the same ID as the previous one, which means that the warning has expired.

Level (Severity)

Every country and region may have its own definitions or protocols for weather warning levels(severity) and not all warning messages have every level, for example, haze warnings are only available in Yellow(Moderate) and Orange(Severe).

Color

For some countries and regions, weather warning levels are usually defined by colors. For mainland China, White (Guangdong Province only), Blue, Yellow, Orange and Red are used. For Hong Kong(SAR China), Yellow, Red and Black are used. For Macau(SAR China), Blue, Yellow, Orange, Red and Black are used. For Russia, White, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red are uesed. For India and European region, Green, Yellow, Orange and Red are available.

In general, the darker the color, the higher the severity of the warning. Currently available colors include:

• White
• Blue
• Green
• Yellow
• Orange
• Red
• Black

Text

For some countries and regions, weather warning levels are usually defined by text. For Kuwait, Minor, Moderate, Severe and Extreme are used. For Brazil, Moderate, Severe and Extreme are applied. For South Africa, Minor, Moderate, Extreme and Unknown are applied. For Australia, Cancel, None, Unknown, Standard, Minor, Moderate, Major, Severe and Extreme are applied. For other countries and regions, Unknown, Minor, Moderate, Severe and Extreme are available.

Currently available text includes:

• Cancel
• None
• Unknown
• Standard
• Minor
• Moderate
• Major
• Severe
• Extreme

Color vs Text

Both color and text can indicate the severity of the warning message, and generally they can be mapped to each other(it is not a rule or standard, just our practice):

Urgency

Urgency is not available in some countries and regions, or does not have the same value as listed below

warning.urgency denotes the urgency of the warning message, including:

• Immediate
• Expected
• Future
• Past
• Unknown

Certainty

Certainty is not available in some countries and regions, or does not have the same value as listed below

warning.certainty denotes the certainty or confidence level of the warning messages, including:

• Observed
• Likely
• Possible
• Unlikely
• Unknown

Warning Type

QWeather provides over 100 warning types based on definitions from official meteorological departments around the world, however, these types are not available to all countries or regions.

We also provide warning icons, please go to QWeather Icons.

As of January 1, 2022, the API will use Type instead of Type (deprecated) return, so please update it.