Overview
The KUBRA Storm Center™ team is pleased to announce that XWeather is the new weather provider for the Storm Center radar layer. This change is part of our ongoing effort to provide the best possible user experience to our utility clients and their customers.
The XWeather radar layer will replace the previous radar content but will not change the existing functionality of your current Storm Center implementation. This change will allow us to provide new features that some of our clients have been requesting, such as having global map coverage.
We believe that XWeather is the right weather provider for what Storm Center offers today, and that it has the capacity to provide other weather-related features we might want to add in the future.
The new XWeather radar layer will be released in preview mode to all development and test instance maps for all Storm Center 5 implementations.
The new XWeather radar layer will be rolled out to production instances and maps two weeks after the release of the preview mode. The purpose of the preview period is to give clients time to review and test the new radar layer in their test maps.
XWeather Radar Layer
The new XWeather radar layer includes the following capabilities and benefits:
- Global coverage: XWeather radar layer covers the entire world, whereas only the U.S. and southern Canada were available from the previous weather provider.
The new radar layer is a combination of:
- Data from radar stations from the following countries: United States, Puerto Rico, Guam, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Ireland, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Northern France, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg.
- The radar data for the rest of the world is derived from satellite images.
With this extended coverage, we will be able to provide radar data to our clients and their customers in the northern parts of Canada as well as other regions in the world.
- Easier to understand: The legend and color palette used to present the radar data follows a much more modern approach and makes it easier to understand current conditions.
- Same functionality: Other than the appearance of the legend and the enhanced coverage, the weather feature will not differ from the current functionality.
- Better uptime service level agreement (SLA): XWeather Service Uptime SLA for Storm Center is 99.9%, up from 99.5% Uptime SLA from the previous weather provider (an improvement of 35 hours per year).
- Improved operational status reporting: XWeather has a status page implemented with the Atlasian product status.io. KUBRA Storm Center clients can subscribe to receive XWeather notifications at https://status.xweather.com/.
The XWeather status page shows the current operational status of all their services, as well as data regarding new releases, product updates, maintenance, and service disruptions.
KUBRA uses the same status.io software from Atlasian for our products’ status page at https://status.kubra.io/, where we show the current operational status of services used by Storm Center (e.g., AWS Services, Google Apps, and Github).
Because XWeather has implemented a third-party component plugin for the status.io software, the KUBRA services status page will soon also be able to include XWeather current operational status for the services used by Storm Center.
- Other benefits:
- XWeather provides historic radar data for the last 30 days instead of just the last hour, as with the previous weather provider. For now, the current radar loop feature will continue to show radar animation for the last hour, but it may be possible in the future to implement radar animations that go back up to 30 days.
- Their infrastructure is hosted in AWS in two different regions with a Disaster Recovery plan in place in case the primary AWS region is down, improving reliability.
- XWeather has a comprehensive list of additional services and weather map layers that the KUBRA Storm Center product team is currently evaluating as possible additions to the product in the future (including forecast radar, tropical cyclones, and storm cells).
- KUBRA Storm Center clients can be confident in the reliability of XWeather because their services are being used by a large number of companies that rely on the accuracy of the weather conditions for their operation. These include Trane Technologies, Trimble, Genesis, HelloFresh, Abyssal, and REVER.
Release Details
- Type: This will be released as a Preview Release. It will not disrupt any current implementations and will not require any action on the part of KUBRA Storm Center clients. For more information about the process for the different types of releases of the Storm Center product, please visit https://docs.kubra.io/release-process/.
- Target preview date: We plan to release the preview to all test maps on June 28, 2021. Client contacts will receive an email when the preview release has been completed for the test maps.
- Target production date: We plan to release the new XWeather radar layer to all production maps on July 12, 2021. Client contacts will receive an email when the release to production has been completed.
- Note: We recommend that KUBRA Storm Center clients use the preview period to get familiar with the new radar layer. If you have questions or concerns, please contact your KUBRA Client Success Manager.