So far as I know there's no central repository for this information, and the way it's distributed is going to be local and idiosyncratic, so there probably won't be a simple single solution any time soon.
(Oh--"snow emergency" is a northern climates thing where, when there has been a heavy snow, there are temporary parking restrictions so that the streets can be plowed to the edges. If you park on the streets this probably means you have to move your car, or risk getting it towed.)
So, has anybody approached this? In the cities I've looked at, it would pretty much have to be approached by screen-scraping or email filtering, and the page that would need to be scraped probably get redesigned fairly often, so it would be kind of annoying to keep working for each city.
Still, I'm curious what tools people use for this sort of thing?
SAME has a list of threats including a number of them related to winter weather. Those can be combined with a locality code. This is the mechanism used for weather alert radios.
Yes. At least my local government (not averse to a general mechanism -- but I rather doubt the info is actually in any one place). There are often snow emergencies without severe storms and without school closing and such; they need to get the streets plowed even if it's not enough to really shut things down. And when I park on the street I need to not get caught by surprise by that. I have other sources of info, but when thinking of HE notification things this came to mind.
So the SAME protocol is what's used on the weather radio? But it's not the actual weather threat, but the local administrative fiat, that I'm look for (here; I do want tornado warnings and such, but have at least some clue how to get those).
Probably not what you're asking for, but my city has an email subscription services for these that I use. I also usually see it elsewhere like Nextdoor or Facebook, too, and if you're driving into the city mine also puts it at major entrances like off of major highway or interstate exits. I don't really need this information in Hubitat, which I assume might be what you're asking for (not sure what I'd do with it that I don't already do myself--or maybe you're not asking since it's in the Lounge category). TV stations also tend to show this inform on screen around here.
But yeah, I not aware of anything central and imagine it would be difficult for the same reasons you mentioned. But I'm happy with the notifications my city already provides, so I'd probably look at those first for yours if you haven't already. (Or at least I think I'm happy with mine; I don't remember them doing it the last couple years, even though there were a couple times this year when they should have; they seem to favor "pseudo snow emergencies" instead where they do something similar but only for a few streets that are heavy with on-street parking, usually several days after any snow event. Or in the most recent case, a couple weeks after when it was already starting to melt...)
Yes, I do fine with the email notification plus web page I can check if I need to confirm the status.
But...I don't have any kind of organized notification scheme in place for anything. I'm thinking that, as I add one, possibly I'll want to include that information, as I get in the habit of using my own notification system as the primary source. But maybe I won't; you never really know as you start into something like this how important it is.
There are quite a number of different emergency notification systems run by various communities and government agencies. I don't think there is any standard but if you had a device subscribed to receive these, I wouldn't think it would be too hard to extract the information you want. Doing it over a large area would require a ton of work up front and to maintain. I can't think of any organization that collects (or even indexes this kind of information). I'll put it on my watch list as I think it's an intriguing concept.
I'm not sure how it works elsewhere, but in my area (and it sounds like the above too). "snow emergency" is just a declaration that allows the city to enforce and ordinance restricting on-street parking more than normal. It's not so much about safety per se like the name may suggest or notification of a snow event (it is different from, say, NWS alerts), and I don't know of any "emergency" channels by which it is broadcast. But I agree that the idea is interesting.
City of Minneapolis does have a phone app to give you snow emergency status. I haven't peeked under the hood, but that kind of suggests there may be a very simple API (like one URL that returns "yes" or "no" ) sitting there that possibly could be exploited.
But it's different for Minneapolis, St. Paul, Richfield, Bloomington, Edina, Brooklyn Park, Hopkins, etc. etc. It looks intractably huge, and the web presence isn't meant for software interface so all the usual issues with a scraping approach would pop up.
It's probably 15 minutes work for somebody who already knows all about writing apps (or is this a driver?) to scrape the Minneapolis system; I've glanced at the web page and there are some pretty trivial regexps that's get a good-enough answer. So people doing it themselves for their own city may be the way to go for a while.
[ETA: yeah, the use of "emergency" is maybe a bit confusing in the name; hadn't occurred to me, it's just what it's called, been a normal part of life forever to me. It's what you say, an administrative declaration of temporary changes to parking rules, for the purpose of getting the streets cleared to the edge.]
) sitting there that possibly could be exploited.
